Marc Garcia knows there will be no shortage of water in the Rio Grande this year. The river flows through his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. After years of drought, the spring rush is a welcome change, but he knows the good times won’t last long.
As summer continues, the river will recede, and Garcia will be put on strict rations. He will be able to irrigate his 300 acres only once every 30 days, which is not enough to sustain his oats 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 and then releases it to help farmers when the river runs dry. More importantly for most New Mexicans, the dam system allows the city of Albuquerque to import water from distant rivers for domestic use.
But El Vado has been out of service for the past three years. Decades of operation have left its structure bulging and warped, but the government has no plans to repair it.
“We need some kind of storage space,” Garcia said. “If we don’t have a big monsoon this summer, we won’t be able to water the fields unless we have a well.”
The dam failure has disrupted the water supply for the entire Albuquerque area, forcing the city and most of its nearby farmers to rely on limited groundwater and threatening endangered fish along the river. In recent years Model For sustainability Capital Management From the west.
“It was really hard to get El Vado out of the picture,” says Paul Tashjian, freshwater conservation director for the Southwest regional office of the nonprofit National Audubon Society. “We’ve been really struggling every year for the last few years.”
By importing surface water from the El Vado system, Albuquerque officials have generally been able to limit groundwater shortages. This mirrors the strategy of other Western metropolises, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, which have made it possible for population growth to tap into multiple water sources for farms in and around the metropolitan area. The Biden administration wants to replicate this strategy in water-scarce rural areas across the region, and is providing more than $8 billion in grants to support pipelines and reservoirs.
But the past decade has shown that this strategy is not perfect—at least not as climate change fuels ongoing megadroughts across the West. Los Angeles has lost water from the Colorado River and a series of reservoirs in Northern California, and Phoenix has lost water not only from the Colorado River but also from the groundwater aquifers that fuel the state’s cotton and alfalfa crops. Now, with Albuquerque’s aging El Vado Dam shut down, the city is struggling to balance several fragile resources.
El Vado is a strange dam. It is one of four dams in the United States that uses a steel faceplate rather than a block of rock or concrete to hold back water. The dam has collected irrigation water for Rio Grande farmers for nearly a century, but decades of research have shown that water is seeping through the faceplate, undermining the dam’s foundation. When engineers tried to fill cracks behind the faceplate with grout, the faceplate accidentally popped out of shape, threatening the stability of the entire structure. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dam, halted construction and is now back on the drawing board.
Without the ability to collect irrigation water for farmers, the state had no choice but to let the Rio Grande flow naturally downstream to Albuquerque. In the spring, when snow melts from the mountains and rain runs off to the ocean, there is plenty of water. But when the rains stop in the summer, the river’s flow is reduced to a trickle.
“We have a really fast and happy run in the spring, and then we drop off pretty dramatically,” said Casey Ish, conservation program supervisor for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, an irrigation district that supplies water to farmers like Garcia. “It just puts a lot of stress on the system later in the summer.” The uncertainty about water availability is causing many farmers to not plant crops they aren’t sure will reach maturity, Ish added.
U.S. Department of Water Resources
The dam also plays a vital role in providing water to the rapidly growing Albuquerque metropolitan area, home to nearly a million people. As the city grew over the past 100 years, local groundwater was drained. Lower the water table by tens of feet Until the city earned a reputation as “one of the biggest water-wasting cities in the West.” Cities across the region were mining groundwater in the same way, but Albuquerque has managed to change its bad habits. In 2008, it built a $160 million water treatment plant that purifies water from the distant Colorado River, giving officials a new source of water to reduce their reliance on groundwater.
The loss of El Vado jeopardizes this achievement. To reach Albuquerque’s treatment plants, Colorado River water must travel through the same canals and pipelines that supply Rio Grande water to the city and farmers, and must “ride” with the Rio Grande water through the pipes. Without the steady flow of Rio Grande water from El Vado, Colorado River water cannot reach the city. That means that in the summer, when the Rio Grande dries up, Albuquerque must now turn to groundwater to supply thirsty residential areas.
This new reliance on groundwater has halted the recovery of local aquifers, which rose from 2008 to 2020 but then plummeted around 2020 and have remained flat since.
“We’ve had to close the surface water treatment plant in Albuquerque for the past three years because of low flows,” says Diane Agnew, a senior official with the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Water District, which manages the area’s water. Agnew emphasizes that groundwater levels are flattening, not falling. Still, losing the El Vado reservoir in the long term would be detrimental to the city’s overall water resilience.
“We have more than enough supply to meet demand, but it changes our equation,” she added.
The Reclamation Bureau is looking at ways to repair the dam and divert Rio Grande water to Albuquerque, but for now, engineers are in a quandary. At a recent meeting with local farmers, a top Reclamation official gave a frank assessment of the dam’s future.
“We haven’t been able to find a technical solution to the problem we’re seeing,” said Albuquerque area manager Jennifer Faler, who spoke at the meeting.
The next best option is to find another place to store water for farmers. There are other reservoirs, including a large dam owned by the Army Corps of Engineers along the Rio Grande, but reusing it for irrigation requires a lengthy bureaucratic process.
A Water Resources Authority spokesperson told Grist that the agency is “working diligently with partners to develop plans and finalize contracts to mitigate the lost storage capacity” and that “there may be capacity to safely store water” for farms and cities next year.
Meanwhile, farmers like Garcia are losing patience. When top officials delivered the bad news at an irrigation district meeting last month, more than a dozen farmers who grow crops in the district stood up to voice their frustration at the delay in the repair process, calling Reclamation’s announcement “disappointing” and “shocking.”
“If we don’t have water for a long time, we’ll probably have to lay off our staff and buy ramen from somewhere,” Garcia told Grist.
There are only a handful of steel faceplate dams like El Vado in the United States, but many more communities in the West are likely to have similar infrastructure problems affecting their water supplies, according to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico.
“We have optimized the entire human and natural community around how we can manipulate river flow through aging infrastructure, and we will increasingly see instances where the infrastructure we have come to rely on is no longer functioning as we planned or intended,” he said.
As the West dries and dams and canals continue to age, more communities may have to balance access to finite but accessible groundwater with renewable but hard-to-get surface water. El Vado’s loss shows that neither of these two resources can be relied on alone. In an era of higher temperatures and aging infrastructure, even having both may not be enough.
