For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry | Hacker News Reader

For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry

inkstain.net

107 pointsmooreds73 comments

An important point here is that it is running dry "intentionally", because the water is otherwise being diverted for use.

This isn't true. I live in Albuquerque about 1/4 of a mile from the river and there's literally no water anywhere. The ditches are dry, the reservoirs in the northern part of the state are tapped out, and the Albuquerque Water Authority stopped diverting water from the Rio Grande several months ago.

It is being diverted before it gets to Albequerque

Some of it is, yes. But a lot of the water flowing through the Albuquerque stretch comes from the Colorado River basin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan–Chama_Project

The entire Colorado River basin is essentially running at critical levels.

Doesn't that mean mcone is correct, and the water isn't being diverted intentionally? The implication from the original comment seems to be humans are doing this on purpose, but the retort from mcone is that's misleading because there is no water and we couldn't fill it if we wanted to.

I am not an expert on this. I'm just reading the comments.

The answer is likely both: dry or drought conditions combined with high water usage leading to the river drying

The article says the Albuquerque drain is flowing at 130 cfs?

Their term for the subterranean water flow. The above ground river is just the top of what’s going on underground.

Before we go claiming that this is a-okay, WHY is it being diverted for use? Have other sources dried up? If so, that would still be really bad.

Yes. Lake Mead and reservoirs across the West half of the US are extremely low. Water originating from the Sierra Nevada range ended up at about 4% of the total water they would expect in a "normal" year.

California's most serious suggestion to this problem is laughable -- cover open irrigation canals with solar panels to reduce evaporation losses. While it will technically achieve something, it is not addressing any part of the root of the problem: wasteful water use on wasteful crops such as almonds, as well as the privatization and nonstop extraction of groundwater by Nestle and other bottlers. We could point to beef as another incredible consumer of water (when accounting for the full food chain) so reducing beef husbandry would be good (replace beef in your diet with chicken and pork for a couple weeks and see if you miss it).

That would be healthier for people as well.

Article wont load for me but part of the issue is that New Mexico can't store any in reservoirs as they owe Texas water due to an interstate compact.

https://apnews.com/article/albuquerque-droughts-weather-nort...

That article doesn't make things sound much better. It seems to pin the blame on persistent drought. The tactic of water being released from reservoirs upstream was used in the past as a band-aid over the symptoms of the drought, but isn't possible this year due to the water debt they have to Texas, as you mention.

Per the USGS gauge[1], the current flows are 21.3 cubic feet per second. The historical low for July 22 is from 1980 when it was 60.0. The flows of the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is controlled by the Cochiti Dam, about 50 miles upriver. The dam is currently at 42 feet full[2], and is currently discharging about 300 cubic feet per second[3] (and appears to run continuously). So in the 50 miles between Cochiti Dam and Alb, about 280 cfs are being lost.

Maybe this is intentional diversion. But for what? I can only conceive of irrigation being the answer (but please call out other reasons). If it is just irrigation "intentionally" causing the river to run dry, that seems....really bad.

Given Cochiti Lake's low level, it won't be long before you can't irrigate those crops, so even the "use" of the water will be wasted. (Perhaps the worst outcome would be to intentionally divert the water to grow crops, but to run out of water before the crops grow fully. Then you've wasted the water and gotten nothing for it.)

[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nm/nwis/uv?site_no=08330000 [2] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nm/nwis/uv/?site_no=08317300&PARA... [3] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv?08317400

Google map of the area: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.5700851,-106.3533147,10454m/...

Oof! It is irrigated agriculture. :(

Thanks for the link, didn't think of that.

Has there been any research into what areas will be the canary in the coal mine for when things go bad bad? Aquifers, rivers, lakes, etc - I'm curious if it's possible to follow the watersheds from the continental divide and determine what the key choke points are.

Shallow wells running dry would be a pretty good early warning sign.

See:

https://theconversation.com/water-wells-are-at-risk-of-going...

I'm not sure what makes you think things aren't going bad bad right now and people aren't paying attention.

I think Bad bad will be a major metro loses reliable water service across their jurisdiction. It would be a major region of the US running out of basic foodstuffs across the board (though logistics of moving food is easier than water).

The current disasters are amplifications and slow creeps of things we've seen before, heat wave, fire, drought.

It's not going to be just one metro. Water planning and distribution focuses strongly on making sure pretty much everyone has at least some water. If water ever becomes too scarce, everyone will feel it at once.

The slow creep is the warning sign -- according to experts we should be doing a lot more than we currently are right now.

Typically water delivery is done to several 'tiers' of customers, where the top tier is consumers. Farmers sit below that and industry below that. This sort of thing will have massive effect, especially if it lasts longer than a few days or weeks, at some point vegetation will die off, cattle will die and people will start moving.

Everyone in that geographic area. We don’t have any ability to move water across the country at present.

Nor should we. There is no reason to build pipelines to send fresh water to the desert.

Why not? It is a hell of a lot cheaper than moving people to the fresh water.

In the long run it isn’t.

I don't think that is at all clear. Building a pipeline has a financial and environmental cost, but so does moving 10s of millions of people.

There are only two sources of water that are "free" (as in not already heavily taxed for human use) and that would really move the needle on the Southwest's water supply: the Canadian Pacific Northwest (Yukon & McKenzie River Watersheds) or, even more quixotic, the Mississippi.

To move that water, in either case, you have to maintain a sufficient drop in your canals/pipes to keep water flowing and prevent sediment buildup. This means that building a flat tunnel across 1000 miles, including through mountains (already an obscenely expensive proposition) is out of the question--you have to pump water up to allow it to flow downward. The energy costs--to speak of nothing else--would be incomprehensible. IIRC, damming up every possible spot in North America wouldn't suffice to provide the energy required.

More to the point, we've already put way more water in the desert than was ever there naturally, and we've irrigated perhaps 10% of it. People always want more. We've already surpassed the long-term carrying capacity of all watersheds within 500+ miles. If we pump more water in from elsewhere, we're just kicking the real problem down the road and making it worse for a future generation. There will never be enough water.

I highly recommend reading Cadillac Desert, it really clarifies this issue.

You're right. Major crop failure (especially in the Midwest) would be a real bad thing. Far worse than a major city running out of water.

I'd watch the various Great Plains aquifers. I think the main outcome of drying isn't going to be thirst, but hunger, and that's the area to keep your eye on for when that'll really kick into high gear. Those aquifers were on track to dry up absent climate change, AFAIK, from severe overuse by agriculture.

Yes, very much, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer is what I think you're talking about. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1220351110 is depressing reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubian_Sandstone_Aquifer_Syste..., also.

Florida is also a large source of many crops, particularly off-season, and they are damaging the Florida aquifer through overuse which is being exacerbated by saltwater intrusion due to rising sea levels (rain falling over land creates hydrostatic pressure along the coasts): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-c...

This is a very good question. The world, and in particular the US and its local geographies, are very well interconnected. I think the "bad bad" is at the systemic level of these interconnections, no single element will point it out.

Move to coastal California. There's enough sun & ocean water to fall back to desalination if need be.

I suspect Arizona will be screwed as they've had a housing surge without similar investment in securing new water sources.

Re: California, not if nimbyism prevails. The brine discharged from a desalination plant is an environmental concern.

https://calcoasttimes.com/2022/05/14/california-coastal-comm...

Aside from nimbyism, replacing natural fresh water source with energy-intense desalination isn't a solution, especially not in the short term. We're already using way too much energy, and at the current rate of decarbonization it'll be decades to a century until climate change will be getting better. Solving the problems brought about by climate change with using more energy will just set us up for a dead spiral.

The problem isn’t that we’re using too much energy. It’s that we aren’t producing enough carbon neutral energy.

Residential use is a tiny % of total use. There is a lot of unnecessary water use in agriculture, lawns, etc that would give before any individual resident is meaningfully affected.

In our water district, we're already at 8 minutes per week of irrigation. With threats of going to 0 minutes per week. Normally we're allowed 45 minutes - 15 minutes, 3x a week.

> that would give before any individual resident is meaningfully affected.

I think we're a lot closer to this than you seem to think.

California has seen droughts before and is currently more at risk than ever before: https://drought.ca.gov/

The Colorado River Basin states are already in crisis mode. The governors just agreed to some emergency action that may head off the worst but drought conditions are expected to keep going so who knows if the reservoirs will recover.

On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power. Here, we must scrabble for desert power.

Title kind of misses the point and triggers an odd/uninformed conversation about trade offs. Ie read the article. This is not good, but the drying is a result of a conscious choice by water management to prioritize away from irrigation.

“Even as the river’s surface flows dry, the ditches are drying too. Irrigators have been warned that absent rain, there will be very little to water their land very soon. South Valley horse owners (the biggest consumers of irrigated stuff around here – the horses, I mean) will be buying hay. It’s a very dry year, the agony of climate change dumped atop some water management chaos.”

Also I would strongly hope, if this is intentional, that they’re refilling the local reserves. They probably need it after the wildfires. And still more can come anytime.

New Mexico was having massive flooding just a few weeks ago, but maybe not localized to Albuquerque.

Mostly flash flooding in burn scars. Not really close to Albuquerque

When you lose topsoil, so that it doesn't infiltrate and retain water, then you will get both floods and droughts.

Albuq was a beneficiary of the San Juan - Chama Project [https://www.sanjuanchama.org/] which (in 1978) diverted 86-110K ac-ft from the Colorado to the Rio Grande thanks to 3 tunnels. Albug got ~48K ac-ft.

But then Santa Fe needed some of that. This 2022 article is about plans to cope with that dilemma.

[https://www.sfreporter.com/news/2022/05/18/where-will-the-wa...]

We're having an unusually wet year about 120 miles SW of Albuquerque, with a big monsoon cycle incoming now. We're not quite out of our long-term drought, but another couple of good storms would do it.

https://sourcenm.com/2021/09/18/memory-of-a-river/

Look at the bright side: children can play in the sand.

The Rio Grande is now neither a rio nor grande.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

The People's Democratic Republic of Korea is neither of the people, nor a democracy, nor a republic.

New Mexico is neither new nor Mexican.

> New Mexico is neither new nor Mexican.

Is Mexico Mexican? I would have said no, just like water is not wet.

New Mexico is in fact older than Mexico the country.

Very clever.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Never sure where the HN cutoff is on comedic posts but thank you for also recognizing this is the Mike Myers as Linda Richman bit on SNL.

I figured there was a chance I'd end up negative on that one, but couldn't let it pass :)

I have to disagree about Republic. It certainly is republic. The general Secretary of the WPK and President of the State Affairs have not named themselves kings.

What is your point?

The word new is not new. McDonald’s isn’t a McDonald. Wendy’s isn’t a Wendy. Microsoft is neither micro nor soft.

The planet periodically goes through floods and droughts everywhere...it would help if western nations stopped allowing immigration...less people, less water needed...no?

The people still exist, possibly in a different location. Best to stop having so many babies. Even better if you already did this 50 years ago.

Germany, Danube river has very low level currently. I cannot remember I saw like that ever. Probably the same observation in Austria/Hungary, can you confirm? This summer is really good, dry, warm, just like somewhere in Greece/Spain. Hopefully will be every summer like this in the future.

..."hopefully"???

Hopefully you're cynically trolling about the incredibly difficult century ahead for humanity.

Think that was meant for the last part of the statement (dry heat) - summers in Germany can be very humid.

Awful take. How are there so many bad takes on HN today. Is reddit down?

I dunno, GP's take seems more appropriate for Truth Social than reddit.

Hopefully? Are you completely insane? This may be a sign of something going majorly mental within our planet.

The actual problem with hoping for every summer to be like this one is that it's deliriously optimistic.

Can confirm from Romania. I found this on YouTube, for ilustration: https://youtu.be/KctTo0yqMnU?t=34 (you can skip around, naration is in Romanian, but the idea is pretty clear). Things are pretty crazy.

> Hopefully will be every summer like this in the future.

Be careful what you wish for...

Elbe is low but still looks ok, hunger stones [1] not yet visible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone

IJssel river in the Netherlands was lower three days ago than I have ever seen it myself.

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