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Colleges offer all sorts of classes and majors these
days, and I'd give serious thought to resuming my formal
education after a 28-year hiatus if I could major in The
Plumbing and Water Politics of the San Luis Valley.
It's a field that I've studied for the past decade, at
least, and I still get surprised.
The latest amazement came last week, when I read that the Valley's water activists were outraged because Yale University's endowment fund invested in a plan to develop Valley water at a profit.
For some reason, I had thought that this was what endowment funds were supposed to do -- make money. But there is the argument that university endowment funds should avoid enterprises that may be legal, but are of dubious morality, such as investments in companies that did business in South Africa during the apartheid days.
However, if it's immoral to make money by buying and selling a necessity of life like water, then our entire Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation starts to resemble the South Carolina Slave Code of 1833.
So it may be best to avoid that angle, and move to some geography. The San Luis Valley is not a single hydrologic entity. It has two basins: the Closed Basin in the north, and the Rio Grande Basin in the south. Water in the south behaves the way it's supposed to -- snow melts, flows into a creek that flows into a river that eventually flows into the ocean.
But water in the north just flows south down toward the Great Sand Dunes, where it either evaporates, or sinks and raises the water table. That shallow water table forms the Unconfined Aquifer.
Several hundred feet beneath the Unconfined Aquifer is a layer of relatively impervious clay. Below the clay is at least a mile and half of gravel that eroded from the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo ranges; the bedrock floor of the Valley is below sea level, and it's part of the great Rio Grande Rift that extends from Leadville to El Paso.
The deep gravel layer has water in the gaps between the grains. That's the Confined Aquifer, and it might hold more than a billion acre feet -- as much water as the Colorado River carries in 70 years.
So, in trying to follow Valley water politics, it's important to remember that there are two basins, Closed and Rio Grande, and two aquifers, shallow Unconfined and deep Confined.
That's the natural plumbing, which has of course been modified. Once the Rio Grande emerges from the San Juans to the Valley floor around Del Norte, much of it is diverted to farms. So much was diverted, in fact, that downstream states like New Mexico and Texas sued in federal court, charging that Colorado had failed to meet its water obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.
To insure that downstream states got their water, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built the Closed Basin Project. It takes water from the shallow Unconfined Aquifer of the Closed Basin, and puts it in the Rio Grande for delivery to New Mexico to make up for what the Colorado farmers take out of the Rio Grande.
This is done with the support of most residents of the San Luis Valley, except for a few diehards in Saguache County.
Now, to the water development schemes proposed first by American Water Development, Inc., and more recently by Stockman's Water Co., which Yale invested in. These would pump water from the deep Confined Aquifer, not the shallow Unconfined Aquifer, and convey the water to whoever might buy it.
And yet, I read that Sen. Wayne Allard, along with
various Valley water activists, said that Yale was
participating in a scheme to destroy the Great Sand
Dunes
because underground water could well be holding
the dunes together.
If the Dunes are indeed congealed by an aquifer, wouldn't it most likely be the shallow Unconfined Aquifer, rather than the deep Confined Aquifer? After all, the Dunes are on the surface, not several hundred feet down under the clay layer that separates the aquifers.
And so if removing water from an aquifer would damage the dunes, doesn't the Closed Basin Project represent the greater risk of damage? Wouldn't pumping water from a 10-foot-deep well be more likely to affect to the Dunes than pumping water from a 500-foot-deep well?
Whatever the merits or demerits of pumping from the deep Confined Aquifer, I don't see how it can have nearly as much effect on the Great Sand Dunes as the pumping that already occurs from the shallow Unconfined Aquifer.
But that's mere speculation based on such geology as I've been able to find, and it doesn't explain the sociology or mythology which holds that it's proper and moral for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to pump water from the Closed Basin, but immoral for any other entity.
Come to think of it, I haven't checked the Yale catalog.
Maybe it offers a major in The Plumbing and Water
Politics of the San Luis Valley,
but then again, it's a
subject that is probably too weird and complex even for an
Ivy League institution.
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