Water, water, who wants some water?
Apr. 25th, 2025 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAbout half of Arizona is technically "desert". It's not all the same desert, but about half of Arizona is desert, by area. Water is an issue in the state.
We visited southern Arizona (Phoenix, Tucson, and points southeast) which was mostly Sonoran desert. Bisbee and Tombstone are not "desert". They are "Desert grasslands" which are different according to the internet.) Anyway, water was A Thing that we noticed and thought about during our visit.
The first thing I noticed (besides how dry the air was, definitely pack a chapstick) was the use of what we'll call intentional water in the landscaping and decoration. Particularly in Phoenix, at the Heard Museum, there were numerous water features in the decorative landscaping. Kind of reminded me of the Alhambra, same style of thing. Running water, the music of brooks and fountains and stuff. It's all done with pumps in the Heard, where the Alhambra was a gravity-fed system, but it was still refreshing just to hear and see that in the heat. (It was about 95 when we were in Phoenix. Tucson was somewhat cooler, Bisbee was damn near liveable.)
The second thing I noticed was the number of what I'd call bridges that went over... places where water was not. Like, they LOOKED like they should have water in them, but they had no water in them. Maybe the water is seasonal (yes) or maybe they're having some sort of huge drought (yes) or maybe they just like the aesthetic (no). We kept driving over these not-bridges and looking for water and there was not water. There is allegedly (for example) a Santa Cruz river in Tucson, but it was not especially visible when we were there. There was a small amount of water in puddles in some parts of it, but it didn't... flow per se.
Arizona has some rivers, but most of them have been eaten up by irrigation and water supply so that they are not "real" rivers anymore. The Salt River, for example, is mostly consumed by Phoenix. Historically it flowed year-round but now it's a dry riverbed (barring storm runoff) once Phoenix drinks her fill. The Gila River also used to be a year-round river, navigable by riverboats from its mouth (on the Colorado at Yuma) to near Phoenix. These days it's a dry riverbed unless there's a storm. Most of the rivers in Arizona work like this... used to run year round, now drunk dry by insatiable thirst of civilization. However, as we were driving from Tucson to Bisbee, we saw a line of green, unusual green, BIG trees, running across Highway 90. It was a bizarre sight.
These trees were not fucking around. They were huge. (They were cottonwoods, which if you have ever read a western you know as the trees that live along the rivers in the southwest.) These were trees that would be firewood size in any country, right proper trees, and SO DAMN GREEN, comparatively speaking. (They're not east coast green but in Arizona they are VERY GREEN.)
Obviously, when we got to the sign that said San Pedro House we pulled over to see if it would explain about the huge green trees in the middle of the fucking desert(ish) plains. We were on our way to the Copper Queen Mine Tour but we had left in plenty of time in case we saw anything interesting on the way, as you do when you're middle aged ladies on vacation.
There was an explanatory sign and a river trail and so forth. I read the sign and we walked along the river trail. (Lala basically lets me read the signs and explain them to her. I summarize well.) We looked at the river. It being the dry season, the river was pretty small, but you can see the erosion along the one bank suggests that this isn't always the case.
People were walking their dogs, a lot. Apparently some people don't keep their dogs leashed when they visit.
(Yes, that's a coyote, not a dog. I am aware. Still funny.)
Back to water.
The third thing I noticed while wandering around the neighborhood of the Heard in Phoenix was that the neighborhoods were inconsistent in their use of xeriscaping. Some folks had "grass" and some folks had "rocks and cactus" and there did not seem to be a rhyme or reason to why. The people who had green grass had to be watering it because we saw brown grass right next door that was obviously unwatered and held to a much lower standard of care.
What we saw of Tucson neighborhoods seemed to be making more of an effort on things like... trees and xeriscaping. The trees were still mesquite and palo verde and ironwood and stuff, the same shrubby smallish trees that grow natively, but there seemed to be more trees. I got the feeling that Tucson was making more of an effort on trees and on water conservation efforts. (You would think that there's not a lot of shade on a palo verde but I assure you that its green stick canopy makes a SERIOUS DIFFERENCE in how hot you feel. It definitely blocks some of the sun and offers real shade, even if it's speckled and incomplete. Do not knock the palo verde.)
So I did some reading.
Phoenix gets about 7 or 8 inches of rain a year. Tucson gets 11 or 12 inches of rain a year. So, more than Phoenix. For comparison, where I live in PA gets about 20 inches of rain a year.
Phoenix AMA (the Active Management Area) folks use about 163 gallons per capita per day.
Tucson AMA folks use 126 gallons per capita per day.
Regular Americans on average use 83 gallons per capita per day.
Here's an informative graph that I lifted from this website to illustrate what's going on with water use. The entire linked page is pretty darned useful, if you would rather read less snark and more... facts.
Note that the orange line is Tucson AMA (Active Management Area, the state has 6 active management areas, for water. Tucson and Phoenix are two of these.) and the pale blue line is the Phoenix AMA. Tucson Water itself (the city only) is the yellow line and "all USA" is the smooth green line where "all Arizona" is the smooth dark blue line.
The most salient takeaway here is that Tucson seems to be doing OK on improving water conservation among households where I think Phoenix has more to do on that front.
A lot of the water for Phoenix and Tucson comes out of the ground. Some of it comes from rivers (the Colorado and Salt rivers, among others) but a lot of it comes from wells. Even though it's a desert on the surface, water underground can totally happen. Heck, water underground was what really killed Tombstone's silver mines. (No, really. They first struck water 520 feet down in the Sulphuret shaft and subsequently the other mines in the town also hit water.) At the Copper Queen Mine, they were pumping out water from the lower levels there, too.
While at the Saguaro West national park, outside of Tucson, we could see in the distance rectangular pools of liquid. These were excess or reclaimed water from Tucson being allowed to percolate back into the aquifer. They had an explanatory sign about them, is how I know. This "soaking into the aquifer" deal is a thing Arizona is doing when they have "extra" water or reclaimed greywater or whatever.
So... Is that working?
Well, the letting water soak in to the aquifer thing is working. Gravity and whatnot helps water soak down. It's kind of how water works. That part is going OK.
Is the ground water getting any better? In places where they are pumping out less than they are "recharging", the ground water levels are coming up a bit. And as long as they get their share of the CAP (central arizona project) water from the Colorado river... which is stressed and whose water has been overpromised since the beginning, they have "extra" water to try to recharge the aquifer with. But on the whole... no. The ground water is not really getting better.
Where does all the water in Arizona go? Well, 70% of it is for agriculture. I can kind of see growing things that need the hot climate of Arizona to grow, but... some of it is literally for hay/alfalfa/beef cows. We got a lotta places in this country where hay/alfalfa/beef cows grow just fine without depleting the aquifers. I am not sure why folks are out there Playing Hay, Alfalfa and Cows in a fucking desert. It just seems dumb as hell. How does that even work? I can't imagine it's cost-effective.
Unless the water's free. Is the water free? Are farmers and ranchers allowed to pump as much water out of the ground as they want?
Yes. Exactly.
(This weird ag use of water in the desert came to my attention during our excursion to Douglas Arizona to see the slag piles from the Copper Queen and the railroad bed along the highway and stuff. There were round green fields with beef cows in them.
See here?
The green circles in the upper left corner are fields for Angus cattle. We drove right past them. They're circle irrigation with Angus cattle.
Note also the lower right corner, that weird black shape? That's the Douglas slag pile from the Copper Queen Mine. It is not small.
And that's what I learned about water in Arizona.
We visited southern Arizona (Phoenix, Tucson, and points southeast) which was mostly Sonoran desert. Bisbee and Tombstone are not "desert". They are "Desert grasslands" which are different according to the internet.) Anyway, water was A Thing that we noticed and thought about during our visit.
The first thing I noticed (besides how dry the air was, definitely pack a chapstick) was the use of what we'll call intentional water in the landscaping and decoration. Particularly in Phoenix, at the Heard Museum, there were numerous water features in the decorative landscaping. Kind of reminded me of the Alhambra, same style of thing. Running water, the music of brooks and fountains and stuff. It's all done with pumps in the Heard, where the Alhambra was a gravity-fed system, but it was still refreshing just to hear and see that in the heat. (It was about 95 when we were in Phoenix. Tucson was somewhat cooler, Bisbee was damn near liveable.)
The second thing I noticed was the number of what I'd call bridges that went over... places where water was not. Like, they LOOKED like they should have water in them, but they had no water in them. Maybe the water is seasonal (yes) or maybe they're having some sort of huge drought (yes) or maybe they just like the aesthetic (no). We kept driving over these not-bridges and looking for water and there was not water. There is allegedly (for example) a Santa Cruz river in Tucson, but it was not especially visible when we were there. There was a small amount of water in puddles in some parts of it, but it didn't... flow per se.
Arizona has some rivers, but most of them have been eaten up by irrigation and water supply so that they are not "real" rivers anymore. The Salt River, for example, is mostly consumed by Phoenix. Historically it flowed year-round but now it's a dry riverbed (barring storm runoff) once Phoenix drinks her fill. The Gila River also used to be a year-round river, navigable by riverboats from its mouth (on the Colorado at Yuma) to near Phoenix. These days it's a dry riverbed unless there's a storm. Most of the rivers in Arizona work like this... used to run year round, now drunk dry by insatiable thirst of civilization. However, as we were driving from Tucson to Bisbee, we saw a line of green, unusual green, BIG trees, running across Highway 90. It was a bizarre sight.
These trees were not fucking around. They were huge. (They were cottonwoods, which if you have ever read a western you know as the trees that live along the rivers in the southwest.) These were trees that would be firewood size in any country, right proper trees, and SO DAMN GREEN, comparatively speaking. (They're not east coast green but in Arizona they are VERY GREEN.)
Obviously, when we got to the sign that said San Pedro House we pulled over to see if it would explain about the huge green trees in the middle of the fucking desert(ish) plains. We were on our way to the Copper Queen Mine Tour but we had left in plenty of time in case we saw anything interesting on the way, as you do when you're middle aged ladies on vacation.
There was an explanatory sign and a river trail and so forth. I read the sign and we walked along the river trail. (Lala basically lets me read the signs and explain them to her. I summarize well.) We looked at the river. It being the dry season, the river was pretty small, but you can see the erosion along the one bank suggests that this isn't always the case.
People were walking their dogs, a lot. Apparently some people don't keep their dogs leashed when they visit.
(Yes, that's a coyote, not a dog. I am aware. Still funny.)
Back to water.
The third thing I noticed while wandering around the neighborhood of the Heard in Phoenix was that the neighborhoods were inconsistent in their use of xeriscaping. Some folks had "grass" and some folks had "rocks and cactus" and there did not seem to be a rhyme or reason to why. The people who had green grass had to be watering it because we saw brown grass right next door that was obviously unwatered and held to a much lower standard of care.
What we saw of Tucson neighborhoods seemed to be making more of an effort on things like... trees and xeriscaping. The trees were still mesquite and palo verde and ironwood and stuff, the same shrubby smallish trees that grow natively, but there seemed to be more trees. I got the feeling that Tucson was making more of an effort on trees and on water conservation efforts. (You would think that there's not a lot of shade on a palo verde but I assure you that its green stick canopy makes a SERIOUS DIFFERENCE in how hot you feel. It definitely blocks some of the sun and offers real shade, even if it's speckled and incomplete. Do not knock the palo verde.)
So I did some reading.
Phoenix gets about 7 or 8 inches of rain a year. Tucson gets 11 or 12 inches of rain a year. So, more than Phoenix. For comparison, where I live in PA gets about 20 inches of rain a year.
Phoenix AMA (the Active Management Area) folks use about 163 gallons per capita per day.
Tucson AMA folks use 126 gallons per capita per day.
Regular Americans on average use 83 gallons per capita per day.
Here's an informative graph that I lifted from this website to illustrate what's going on with water use. The entire linked page is pretty darned useful, if you would rather read less snark and more... facts.
Note that the orange line is Tucson AMA (Active Management Area, the state has 6 active management areas, for water. Tucson and Phoenix are two of these.) and the pale blue line is the Phoenix AMA. Tucson Water itself (the city only) is the yellow line and "all USA" is the smooth green line where "all Arizona" is the smooth dark blue line.
The most salient takeaway here is that Tucson seems to be doing OK on improving water conservation among households where I think Phoenix has more to do on that front.
A lot of the water for Phoenix and Tucson comes out of the ground. Some of it comes from rivers (the Colorado and Salt rivers, among others) but a lot of it comes from wells. Even though it's a desert on the surface, water underground can totally happen. Heck, water underground was what really killed Tombstone's silver mines. (No, really. They first struck water 520 feet down in the Sulphuret shaft and subsequently the other mines in the town also hit water.) At the Copper Queen Mine, they were pumping out water from the lower levels there, too.
While at the Saguaro West national park, outside of Tucson, we could see in the distance rectangular pools of liquid. These were excess or reclaimed water from Tucson being allowed to percolate back into the aquifer. They had an explanatory sign about them, is how I know. This "soaking into the aquifer" deal is a thing Arizona is doing when they have "extra" water or reclaimed greywater or whatever.
So... Is that working?
Well, the letting water soak in to the aquifer thing is working. Gravity and whatnot helps water soak down. It's kind of how water works. That part is going OK.
Is the ground water getting any better? In places where they are pumping out less than they are "recharging", the ground water levels are coming up a bit. And as long as they get their share of the CAP (central arizona project) water from the Colorado river... which is stressed and whose water has been overpromised since the beginning, they have "extra" water to try to recharge the aquifer with. But on the whole... no. The ground water is not really getting better.
Where does all the water in Arizona go? Well, 70% of it is for agriculture. I can kind of see growing things that need the hot climate of Arizona to grow, but... some of it is literally for hay/alfalfa/beef cows. We got a lotta places in this country where hay/alfalfa/beef cows grow just fine without depleting the aquifers. I am not sure why folks are out there Playing Hay, Alfalfa and Cows in a fucking desert. It just seems dumb as hell. How does that even work? I can't imagine it's cost-effective.
Unless the water's free. Is the water free? Are farmers and ranchers allowed to pump as much water out of the ground as they want?
Yes. Exactly.
(This weird ag use of water in the desert came to my attention during our excursion to Douglas Arizona to see the slag piles from the Copper Queen and the railroad bed along the highway and stuff. There were round green fields with beef cows in them.
See here?
The green circles in the upper left corner are fields for Angus cattle. We drove right past them. They're circle irrigation with Angus cattle.
Note also the lower right corner, that weird black shape? That's the Douglas slag pile from the Copper Queen Mine. It is not small.
And that's what I learned about water in Arizona.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-27 03:42 am (UTC)The fact that so much damn water goes to agriculture and cattle in such a drought-burdened area is infuriating to me.