Mark Garcia doesn’t expect any water shortages this year on the Rio Grande, which flows past his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. After years of drought, the spring surge in water is a welcome change, but he knows the good times won’t last.
As the summer continues, the river levels drop and Garcia faces severe water restrictions: He can irrigate his 300 acres only once every 30 days, hardly enough to sustain his oat and alfalfa crops.
For decades, Garcia and other farmers along the Rio Grande have relied on water released from a dam called El Vado, which collects and stores billions of gallons of river water, eventually releasing it to help farmers when the river dries up. More importantly for many New Mexico residents, the dam system allows the city of Albuquerque to import river water from far away for domestic use.
But El Vado has been out of service for the past three summers, its structure swollen and disfigured by decades of operation, and the government has no plans to restore it.
“We need some kind of storage facility,” Garcia said. “Unless we get a big monsoon this summer, we won’t have a water supply without wells.”
The dam’s failure has upended water supplies for the entire region around Albuquerque, forcing the city and many nearby farmers to rely on limited groundwater and threatening endangered fish species along the river — a surprising twist of fate for a region that has emerged in recent years as a water-rich area. model Sustainable Water Management To the west.
“It’s really hard to see El Vado go,” said Paul Tashjian, director of freshwater conservation for the Southwest Chapter of the nonprofit National Audubon Society. “We’ve been struggling to get by year after year for the last few years.”
Importing surface water from the El Vado system has allowed Albuquerque officials to largely tame groundwater shortages. This overlaps with strategies in other big Western cities, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, which have allowed their populations to grow by using diverse water sources for their urban areas and farms outside of them. The Biden administration is seeking to replicate this strategy in water-scarce rural areas across the region, providing more than $8 billion in grants to support pipelines and reservoirs.
But the past decade has shown that this strategy isn’t a silver bullet—at least not while climate change is causing ongoing megadroughts across the West. Los Angeles has lost water from both the Colorado River and a chain of Northern California reservoirs, while Phoenix has seen water decline not only from the Colorado River but also from the groundwater aquifer that supports the state’s cotton and alfalfa crops. Now, as Albuquerque’s aging El Vado Dam fails, the city is trying to balance multiple fragile resources.
El Vado is an unusual dam: it’s one of only four in the United States that uses a steel faceplate to hold back water, rather than a block of rock or concrete. For nearly a century, the dam has collected irrigation water for farmers from the Rio Grande, but decades of investigations revealed that water was leaking through the faceplate and undermining the dam’s foundations. When engineers tried to use grout to fill cracks behind the faceplate, they accidentally deformed it, threatening the stability of the entire structure. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dam, paused construction and is now going back to the drawing board.
Without the ability to collect water for farmers to irrigate, the water department had no choice but to allow the Rio Grande to flow naturally downstream to Albuquerque. Water is plentiful in the spring, when mountain snow melts and rain flows toward the ocean. But by early summer, when the rains stop, the river’s volume dwindles to a trickle.
“It’s going well in the spring, but then it drops off pretty quickly,” said Casey Ish, conservation program supervisor for the Middle Rio Grande Conservation District, an irrigation district that provides water to farmers like Garcia. “By the end of the summer, it’s really stressing the system.” The uncertainty about water distribution has led many farmers to give up on planting crops that they may or may not see reach maturity, Ish added.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
The beleaguered dam also plays a vital role in providing water to the rapidly growing Albuquerque metropolitan area, which has a population of nearly 1 million. As the city has grown over the past century, the dam has depleted local groundwater, Aquifer levels drop by dozens of feet Over time, Albuquerque gained a reputation as one of the biggest water-waste cities in the West. While all the cities in the region were similarly mining groundwater, Albuquerque managed to change its bad habits. In 2008, Albuquerque built a $160 million water treatment plant that allowed it to purify water from the remote Colorado River, giving officials a new source of water to reduce their reliance on groundwater.
The loss of El Vado puts this achievement in jeopardy. To reach the Albuquerque treatment plant, Colorado River water must “flow” through pipes with the Rio Grande, through the same canals and pipelines that deliver Rio Grande water to the city and farmers. Without a steady flow of Rio Grande water from El Vado, the Colorado River water cannot reach the city. That means that in the summer, when the Rio Grande dries up, Albuquerque must rely on groundwater to provide water for parched residential areas.
A renewed reliance on groundwater has halted the recovery of local aquifers, whose water levels rose between 2008 and 2020, but plummeted around 2020 and have remained steady since.
“Albuquerque’s low water levels have forced us to shut down our surface water treatment plant the past three summers,” says Diane Agnew, senior executive director at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Authority, which manages the region’s water. Agnew emphasizes that aquifer levels aren’t falling, just plateauing. Still, the long-term loss of El Vado Reservoir would have a negative impact on the city’s overall water resiliency.
“There is more than enough supply to meet demand, but that is changing,” she added.
The Bureau of Reclamation is trying to find a way to repair the dam and return Rio Grande water to Albuquerque, but for now, its engineers are at an impasse. During a recent meeting with local farmers, a senior bureau official offered a blunt assessment of the dam’s future.
“We have not been able to find a technological solution to the challenges we face,” Jennifer Farrar, the department’s Albuquerque regional manager, said in remarks at the meeting.
The next best thing is to find another place to store the farmers’ water. There are other reservoirs along the Rio Grande, including a large dam owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, but reusing it for irrigation requires a lengthy bureaucratic process.
A Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson told Grist that the agency is “working diligently with partners to develop plans and finalize agreements to mitigate the lost storage capacity” and that “it is possible that we may be able to safely store some water” for farms and cities as soon as next year.
Meanwhile, farmers like Garcia are growing frustrated. When a senior Irrigation Department official delivered the bad news at an irrigation district meeting last month, more than a dozen farmers who grow crops in the district rose to voice their frustration over the delays in repairs and called the Reclamation announcement “frustrating” and “shocking.”
“If we don’t have water for a long time, we’re going to have to lay off our employees and start looking for ramen somewhere else,” Garcia told Grist.
John Fleck, a water policy professor at the University of New Mexico, said while there are only a handful of steel faceplate dams like El Vado in the U.S., many more communities in the West are likely to experience similar infrastructure issues that affect their water supplies.
“We’ve optimized entire human and natural societies by allowing our aging infrastructure to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re going to see more and more examples of the infrastructure we rely on no longer functioning as planned or intended,” he said.
As the West dries out and dams and canals age, more communities may be forced to strike a balance between readily available but finite groundwater and renewable but hard-to-source surface water. The loss of El Vado shows that we cannot rely solely and consistently on one of these resources. And in an era of rising temperatures and aging infrastructure, having both may not be enough.
