ENGINEERING EDEN
The world's attempt to outsmart water scarcity
By Kaitlin Sullivan
IN THE MIDDLE OF COLORADO'S EASTER PLAINS
sit two cement stairs that lead nowhere. In the early 1930s a boy stood on the stairs watching as Bud Walker pointed a rifle at his neighbor’s chest.
Walker was a farmer on the brink of both the Dust Bowl and The Great Depression. His neighbor was in the same predicament and had let his sheep drink from a ditch that didn’t belong to him. Walker pulled the trigger.
At the time the stairs still belonged to a one-room schoolhouse. It was where the boy attended grade school. The farmers of Crowley County were weathering their first devastating drought. Nearly two-thirds of the county’s land was dedicated to agriculture and Crowley County’s natural water supply was running dry.
A late frost had already destroyed the orchards that infused the local economy with fruit money. The sugar beets that survived the frost refused to grow in dry soil. Tomatoes shriveled on the vine.
The man’s body dropped to the dirt beneath a gnarled cottonwood tree, haloed by a pool of blood. The boy ran to the nearest doctor’s house. It was too late.
Bud Walker was only defending his water.
Today there is no trace of the lumber that once gave the stairs a purpose. Such relics stud Crowley County’s beige landscape, which has suffered four notable droughts since the day of the murder.
Countries around the world are running out of fresh water. Forty-three already live with water scarcity, requiring more water than they have.
China’s chronic shortage is driven by an attempt to support nearly 20 percent of the world’s humans. Beijing added 1.2 million people within its city limits in just three years. The megalopolis now relies on the largest water transfer project to date, pulling 126 million gallons of water from the Yangtze River, the equivalent of Lake Tahoe every week. When completed, the engineering marvel will cost $62 billion, the net worth of Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2018, Australia experienced its worst drought in 100 years. Europe was hit hard, too, leaving 90 percent of Germany in a drought.
A severe shortage of rainfall over southern South America left parts of Argentina and Uruguay in the worst drought in decades. The silent disaster cost nearly $4 billion in economic loss. It was the most expensive weather-related disaster either country had ever seen, but it’s possible they saw it coming.
In 2015 the global water crisis took first place in The World Economic Forum’s assessment of the risks that will have the most significant impact on economies, environments and people. Water beat out 27 other long-term risks including infectious diseases and weapons of mass destruction.
What happened to Crowley County on the plains of Southeastern Colorado is a cautionary tale of borrowed water. It's been called the Detroit of Colorado, decimated by the reliance of a single industry. In this case, that industry was water. It's a wanted to see water ground zero; what could soon be the fate of 43 countries.
The four towns that make up Crowley County are each five miles apart.
Annette Barber’s sedan cut through three of them on our way to Sugar City, the town closest to Kansas.
My guide was a native of Crowley, Colo. Her straight blonde hair hangs level with the small of her back, very few fine lines clutter her complexion. She looks much too young to be the grandmother of teenagers.
We turned left at a gravel road and onto pavement that needed to be sealed. The drizzle was barely enough moisture to wet the windshield. From the driver’s seat, Barber painted a picture in my head of the bygone days that lead to the scene I was experiencing now.
She explained that Colorado is one of the few places where farmers can sell their water without forfeiting their land. It’s similar to a mineral right in that way. Water rights are private property that can sold by the person who owns it. A person doesn’t need physical water to sell it, just the right to it.
The government has a pet name name for the process cities use to acquire water rights from farmers. They call it Buy and Dry. Barber knows the system well.
“We became the poster child of what not to do,” she said in a rehearsed tone. It was something she and many others had said before.
In the early ‘70s, Crowley County was deep in the throes of a drought. They had seen just three inches of ran in two years, well below the eleven that was typical.
Farmers’ hands were tied––the right to water does not irrigate land, provide a living, only the physical element has such power. Collectively, Crowley County farmers sold 95 percent of the county’s irrigation water to three cities: Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Aurora. The county was nearly dry within the year.
Harry and Darla Weyno were among the hundreds of farmers who lined up that year outside the yellow victorian house that served as the county government building, looking to meet with a water broker. The Weynos were quoted $1,200 for each of their 105 shares of Twin Lakes Canal Company water. They took the deal and let Twin Lakes seal their ditch.
The sum was enough to pay off the remainder of debt a life of farming will rack up. Water financed two cars and college tuition for both of their kids.
“I don’t blame the people who sold,” said Shad Sullivan, a local and self-proclaimed cowboy, when Barber and I visited his ranch earlier that morning. “I don’t think they saw what was coming.” Sullivan is one of the few people left in Crowley County still working the land. "This town has been full of farmers for a long time who don't make a living farming,” he said.
Harry Weyno was one of those people. He worked at the local bank to supplement the meager income he could glean from farming.
Barber turned right on a paved road adjacent a retired yellow railcar. The Sugar City Cafe and the town’s branch of the United States Postal Service were the only occupied buildings on Main St. A sign stationed high on a pole next to the post office used to light up. The store below once sold hotdogs. That was back when the town housed enough patrons to support two restaurants.
Back then, Sugar City had put Crowley County on the map. The town had been built on beets. At the turn of the 20th century the promise of work drew families from around the country, eager to cash in on the magenta root vegetable. Brochures labeled Sugar City the Garden of Eden.
If Barber hadn’t pointed them out, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the two stacks of bricks at the end of the mostly vacant strip.
“These are my project right now,” said Barber. “I’m trying to get them officially recognized as a historical site.” The stacks of bricks were all that’s left of the great sugar beet factory. She wanted to show me what was left of Atkinson family grocery store next.
Barber’s father closed his multigenerational family grocery store in 1980 and moved to Kansas to drive semi-trucks. The abandoned store sits two blocks from Barber’s childhood home and four from her passion project. I knew we had arrived when we stopped in front of a row of buildings with boarded windows. When the water left, so did the farmers. Without the farmers, there was no one to sell groceries to.
Barber retired from teaching four years ago and now runs the Crowley Heritage Center. She collects relics, solves mysteries and attempts to convince organizations to fork up the cash needed to preserve what’s left of Crowley County since its economy collapsed.
Standing in the basement of the Heritage Center I lifted the red leather cover of a book of newspaper pages, Barber circled the room, flicking on lights. I flipped to an Ordway New Era article from Friday, Nov. 26, 1932. This was the day a man from New York proposed a plan that would engineer Crowley County out of its first water crisis.
The article was published around the same time Bud Walker shot his neighbor. The booming farm economy had outgrown its local water supply––a combination of the Ogallala Aquifer and the Arkansas River, which carves through the land just south of the county’s four towns––but technology promised to create more.
The Twin Lakes Canal Company hired a fleet of engineers who would drill a hole through the Continental Divide. Melted snow would flow from Rocky Mountains, through the tunnel and into Crowley County at a rate of 756 cubic feet per second, over two-thirds the amount the Mississippi River carries each second.
The Twin Lakes Tunnel project was up and running by the spring of 1936, bringing 41.5 million shares of water flowing to Colorado’s high plains. With Rocky Mountain water, Crowley County could sustain the Garden of Eden it had been advertising on its brochures.
“It was a major feat of engineering,” said Barber, reading over my shoulder.
The fix was temporary.
In the past two decades, Colorado’s population has grown
at one of the fastest rates in the country, adding nearly 92,000 people between 2010 and 2016 alone, mainly to cities along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, an area called the Front Range.
Eighty-percent of the state’s population lives east of the Rocky Mountains, while 80 percent of its water flows west of the range. An additional three million people are expected to relocate to the state in the next three decades. Most will live on the Front Range. Colorado is a scaled-down version of a global trend. During the 20th century the world population tripled, while the amount of water humans use multiplied sixfold.
Driven by Front Range sprawl, Coloradans are on track to support a water deficit of 500,000 acre-feet by 2050, enough to fill nearly a quarter-million Olympic-size swimming pools. Drying farmland and redirecting the water to cities, as was the case in Crowley County, is still the cheapest option for securing new water sources for Colorado’s cities. For struggling farmers, water is often the last asset they have to sell.
Around 25 percent of Colorado's irrigated farmland was lost to Buy and Dry between 1997 and 2012. The loss fallowed entire communities of people who find both a paycheck and their identities through living off the land. Though damaging, the process is completely legal.
“No one argues that water is private property that can be sold,” says Gary Barber, a veteran water broker with nearly 30 years of Colorado water trading under his belt. “On the other hand, the community doesn’t get any benefit from the sales. In fact, it takes a hit when water rights leave local area for somewhere else.”
The price a farmer can collect for his water is enticing.
Prices in northern Colorado’s largest reservoir system, the Colorado-Big Thompson project, reached an all time high in May. A single unit of water could sell for more than $50,000, double the going rate just five years ago. City-dwelling consumers haven’t noticed the price spike.
That’s because water functions as commodity like nothing else. “We all agree we have to pay for oil but water is seen as a right,” says Gary Barber, who has no relation to Annette from Crowley County. “You want it to be a commodity, but not a total commodity.”
If a person cannot afford to purchase gasoline to fuel a car, there are other options for transportation. A person cannot survive more than a week without water, but exactly how much water are we each entitled to?
If you live in China, the answer is 48 liters per day.
Chinese law requires that its residents economize their individual water use. It is clearly stated in Article 8 of the Water Law of the People's Republic of China.
The government implemented a water pricing system in the ‘80s to change the way its citizens view their right to water. Each citizen is charged a subsidized price for up to 48 liters of water, determined an adequate amount to conduct daily life. The price jumps for every unit used after that.
Colorado doesn’t have plans to do the same.
Instead, a water plan released in 2016 continues to address the problem at a business-to-business level rather than getting the consumer involved. The Colorado Water Plan pushes for a set of alternative transfer methods that could curb Buy and Dry. The new methods allow farmers to temporarily lease water to municipals in times of excess without permanently drying farmland. It’s a good idea, in theory.
Currently just one watershed, the Arkansa River basin, has successfully used the ATM model to temporarily move water from farms to cities. The paperwork takes time, so both farmers and city water representatives still rely on permanent water removal.
Dr. Scott Moore is both a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a global authority on water. He explained the most simple terms of water economics to me over the phone: When left to the B2B model, urban water use almost always has highest economic return. People in cities are far more economically productive, so by prioritizing urbanites in water distribution, society will get the highest economic return on investment out of each drop of precious water if it’s used by people who work in cities.
Moore’s concept is reflected in the flow of water from farms to cities in modern day. Without securing a source of water, the number of urban water users who drive the economy cannot grow.
In 1932, when the Colorado Canal was first proposed, Crowley County’s booming agricultural economy was valuable, so moving water there was economically justified.
Orlando Torres lives across the street from the Crowley County Heritage Center,
the spot Annette Barber had arranged for my new guide and I to meet. Like Barber, Torres is patient, kind and a product of of Crowley, Colo.
We drove deep into a maze of gravel backroads with numbers for names, enroute to a spot, Torres told me, where the difference between farmers who still have a right to water and those who sold it would be most apparent.
The Heimrichs are one of 60 families left farming in the county, down from around 800 in its heyday. “Still, they’re barely making ends meet,” said Torres. I got down from the cab of his black pickup truck to take stock of the scene.
Rows of six-foot-tall corn on the Heimrich property were flanked by land overtaken by desert. The landscape was shades of beige, a patchwork of ampley spaced cholla cacti, sagebrush and tumbleweed framed by dry patches of sandy earth.
I wanted to see where the water was now. Conveniently, it was only around seven miles away from the corn.
The tires on Torres’s truck made a crunching noise against the gravel parking lot on the western shore of Lake Henry.
Lake Henry and its twin, Lake Meredith, are misnomers. They aren’t lakes at all but manmade pits created to hold snow melt piped through the Colorado Canal from the High Rockies to the Eastern Plains, the result of the first time Crowley County ran out of water. The reservoirs still hold that water today, just not for Crowley County.
The lakes are featured on the official website for The City of Aurora, a suburb of Denver 160 miles northwest of Ordway, filed under Things to Do and Recreation.
A single camper was parked 100 yards away along Lake Henry’s sandy shoreline.
“That’s just because it’s Friday morning,” Torres reassured me that both lakes would be packed with campers once the weekend kicked in.
Promoting camping, fishing and boating on the reservoirs was one of the hopeful plans the county had to rebuild its economy now that the water belonged to someone else’s land. For a brief couple of years in the late 2000s the lakes were marketed to veterans as a peaceful escape for them and their families.
The branding never took off.
Coloradans have always played a dangerous game with water,
requiring more than is available to them without funneling it through a series of pumps, ditches and tunnels that move water through the third largest mountain range in the world. Where water is channeled changes and drought is cyclical. Scarcity, however, remains a constant.
China understands Colorado’s dilemma. Beijing gets around 70 percent of its water from an aqueduct that stretches nearly 900 miles across its eastern half. At $79 billion, it’s one of the most expensive engineering feats in history. The South-North Water Diversion Project channels fresh water from the Yangtze River in the mountainous heart of the country to tanks in Beijing — about one Lake Tahoe’s worth every eight days.
But it isn’t enough.
A new city was built southwest of Beijing last April, adding 5.4 million people to the aqueduct’s territory. The farmland surrounding Beijing has already been sucked dry, so China’s government is devising new strategies. One strategy is taxing groundwater at twice the rate of surface water.
The South-North Water Diversion Project cuts through farming communities with dry aquifers and no way to access the mighty manmade river. Those who can afford it drill deeper into the Earth in search of liquid, but the high taxes would make this practice an even greater financial burden. Projects are in the works to divert water from the Tibetan Plateau and the Yellow River to China’s seaport cities. The plan will take casualties.
Last year, when northern China suffered its worst drought on record, farmers were hit the hardest. Their land turned to near-desert plains. Cosmopolitan decorative fountains, in contrast, remained on full display.
In the Middle East, there is not water to displace in the first place. One Emirati businessman has engineered a plan that could change that within the next decade.
Abdulla Al Shehi could be thought of as the Elon Musk of water, his car wash empire, Geowash, the Tesla of car wash operations. The sleek, white carts on the GeoWash website are third generation. They use less than two liters of water per wash, two fewer than the gen-one models, and more than 200 fewer liters of water than are flung about by whirling strips of fabric at conventional car washes.
Al Shehi’s water innovation doesn’t stop there. In his most recent venture, Al Shehi is the founder of National Advisor Bureau Limited, a private engineering firm based in Dubai. The firm wants to tow a 100-million-ton iceberg from international waters north of Antarctica to the coast of the the United Arab Emirates. Its final destination would be Dubai’s gold-plated faucets.
The Middle East is rounding out the year in its worst drought in nearly a millennium. More Afghans were displaced this year by drought than by conflict. More than 80,000 people have left their villages in search of water in cities and that number could double by the new year.
In Dubai, money has kept water in the tap but the desert city’s engorged population tempts the longevity of current sources. A displaced iceberg bobbing off its coast could provide millions of gallons of fresh water to Dubai in the form of melted ice chips.
Al Shehi thinks Cape Town, South Africa could be a promising secondary market for the project, however, he has competition.
A South African company has also entered the iceberg arms race with serious intentions. Nick Sloane, a 56-year-old salvage expert successfully brought a chunk of Antarctic ice to the Canary Islands on a computer simulation. Sloane is on the same timeline as Al Shehi, hoping to tow an iceberg to Cape Town by the end of 2019. Icebergs floating in international water are free fresh water to companies that can move them.
Towing icebergs is not a new plan. Engineers and scientists have been devising ways to displace sheets of calved ice since the 1950s. The difference is, we may now have the technology to actually do it.
Al Shehi’s plans to utilize a fleet of tug boats and the ocean’s natural currents to tow the iceberg to a midway point, either Perth, Australia or Cape Town, South Africa. From there, a new fleet would tow the mass of frozen fresh water to the Arabian Peninsula, securing it in deep waters off the eastern coast of the United Arab Eremites. Still, Al Shehi isn’t sure the ice won’t melt during its 5,700-mile trip.
The businessman claims his project has already grossed $60 million from private investors. In the end, he estimates the UAE Iceberg Project could rack up a bill as high as $120 million. Converting Dubai’s salty groundwater into freshwater, a process called desalination, could cost six times that.
In Al Shehi’s best case scenario, he believes the icebergs would change the region’s climate, the cold, moist air attracting a vortex of clouds over the Arabian Sea that would produce rainfall.
In an article published by the Khaleej Times, he was quoted saying such a climate alteration would make the UAE “a hub for exporting water to the world.” At the end of the article he elaborated on the impact:
“Moreover, we will be the first desert country to offer glacial tourism and people will not have to travel to Antarctica to see icebergs anymore.”
On my final morning in southeastern Colorado
I found myself at the only restaurant left on Ordway’s main drag. There was an OPEN sign in one window and one that read FOR SALE in the other.
I ordered a green chili breakfast burrito and eavesdropped on the three men sitting next to me. I had heard one of them say water.
The first of the three men to extend a handshake had white hair and a clean t-shirt to match. It was Kenny Bandemiere. I told him I had met his son Kaleb the day before and that he was on my list of people to contact.
Bandemiere had famously been one of the few who had not sold his water. People with the right to water were not supposed to fall short, but Bandemiere proved otherwise. The small town grapevine is strong and it had told me that the latest drought had forced Bandemiere to sell his cattle by early July. He confirmed that the sale had grossed $600 a head. Without enough water to grow pasture, he needed hay to keep his heard alive. Hay is the primary crop for 25 of the 28 counties in Colorado that experienced drought conditions this year, meaning hay crops went the way of Bandemiere’s pasture. Hay prices doubled this year, making it impossible for ranchers to survive with already razor-thin margins.
“Water affects every industry,” said Bandemiere. “And around here it’s dependent on how much of it mother nature wants to give you.” His friends, two brothers, nodded in solidarity. The Hijar family had sold their water at the same time seemingly everyone else but the Bandemiere trust did.
“The devastation here will never happen anywhere else,” added John Hijar.
Mark Squillance disagrees. He’s the Director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. When we spoke on the phone he explained that most Buy and Dry towns are turned into suburbs. Expanding cities stay close to home when tapping resources. Developers redress the agricultural land in four-bedroom homes starting in the lower 300s. But as the demand grows and water disappears, cities have to travel further in their quest. According to Squillance, what happened to Crowley County will likely happen elsewhere. It will likely happen soon.
I left Bits and Spurs and turned left down the empty street, noticing three more FOR SALE signs in the buildings flanking the restaurant. I walked down an empty Main St. in the direction of the yellow victorian mansion the Weynos had lined up in front of in 1976. The County Commissioner’s office was through the door on the side of the mansion that faced the high school.
Tobe Allumbaugh invited me into his office and told me that if I misquoted him, he’d send his lawyers after me. The former international businessman has lived in India and China but Crowley County is home and he is Commissioner. His white shirt and graying hair were both pressed into place. A silver belt buckle covered the button of his jeans.
Water was not an option, I knew that now. But I wanted to know if there was another source that could save a county that had spent so much time on life support.
“I’ve been trying to find it for 20 years,” said Allumbaugh.
The first thing he did when he came into office in the ‘90s was build the private prison, the farming county’s second prison the site of the 2004 all-night riot. In an effort to create a surrogate economy once the water left, the state installed the county’s first prison in the late ‘70s.
The facility promised to bring careers to the people who were already there and attract job seekers from far away. Restaurants would have patrons. Locals invested in the county's real estate with plans to resell homes for a profit to newcomers.
The thought of vitality was wishful thinking. Prison guards commuted in from other places. They brought bag lunches. Since it was a state prison, the town couldn’t collect on taxes.
Tax revenue from the private prison, on the other hand, made up over half of the county’s annual income. Allumbaugh’s first project was a success, but it was no silver bullet.
One year he tried to convince Wal-Mart to build a warehouse in Crowley but Pueblo was deemed a more suitable spot, Crowley was too far off the beaten path. It wasn't the only company to turn down such a prospect. The county doesn’t produce enough electricity for some of the industries that have considered bringing jobs to the area. For others, there isn’t enough water.
“How long are we going to sit on our hands and wait for someone to turn the lights out?” said Allumbaugh from behind the stacks of paperwork on his mahogany desk.
His decision to allow marijuana grows to set up shop within county lines is controversial. Most people hate it. Allumbaugh, on the other hand, sees the decision as a way to buy time, to refuse to sit on his hands.
“The school’s broke, the feedlot is going out of business,” explained Allumbaugh. He made sure I understood that he only approves grows that sell to the recreational use market. Medical grows can’t be taxed.
Allumbaugh stood up and unpinned a piece of computer paper from a cluttered bulletin board opposite his desk. He handed it to me. Several photos had been stitched together to create a scene of a dolphin leaping out of a gray reservoir in the middle of the beige landscape on Crowley County’s eastern end.
Once, the task of finding Crowley County’s silver bullet became so taxing, the County Commissioner’s office devised a satirical plan that involved planting penguin decoys in Lake Meredith to draw tourists.
Maybe if he could find a way to bring penguins to Crowley County people wouldn't have to go to Antarctica to see them.
-
