By KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock
As another longtime resident, I’d like to pick up on the underlying question in Betty Jacob’s recent letter to the Los Alamos Daily Post (link) which, put another way, was, “Are we preserving Los Alamos’ quality-of-life?” My variation of that question is, “Water” we going to do for water?
We’re exploding the town’s population with, apparently, no thought to the prolonged Southwest megadrought, which, despite the current relatively wet winter, is still ongoing and ranks as the most severe in centuries.
Yet, Los Alamos—seemingly as thoughtlessly as Albuquerque and Santa Fe—is rushing to grow based on the assumption of enough water.
Yes, Los Alamos owns rights, at least on paper, to San Juan-Chama Diversion water. That would be the water that, in recent drought years, mostly hasn’t existed to flow into the massive diversion under the San Juan Mountains that brings Colorado River water into Rio Grande Valley. That absence of Colorado River water is much of why, in recent years, Abiquiu and other reservoirs shriveled like raisins in the sun.
So, what if the current drought continues or worsens to again shrink the nation’s biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, meaning threats to California’s water supply? Seemingly lost on New Mexicans is that California—because of compromises granted to get it to sign the 1922 Colorado River Compact—can put a “call” on the river and take water allocated to New Mexico and other Colorado River Basin states, never mind that we’ve foolishly expanded cities predicated on that water.
Therefore, Los Alamos’ sole source of water is the aquifer beneath our feet. Yet, in the 1990s—during wet years and before wildfires—hydrologists at LANL stated, without qualification, that our aquifer was being “mined” or drawn down by several feet a year. So, what is its status after wildfires of unprecedented size and intensity seared miles the above-ground watershed, as heat and drought baked the region and as our population grew?
Why no current, scientific study (not one to prove enough water for the lab’s agenda) to answer the critical question of, “Do we have enough water?”
