There’s less time to save the Colorado River than it took to build the Hoover dam. Join our radical new inclusive collaboration Water, United.

“There it is. Take it.”

The famous words of William Mulholland, one of the fathers of modern Los Angeles. The ‘it’ he was referring to was not gold, or oil. It was water. An entire river in fact. One which had been diverted 200 miles from the fertile Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada as part of an engineering project of breath-taking ambition.

The 1913 LA Aqueduct was built to supply the fledgling city on a semi-arid coastal plain with enough water to quench its thirst four times over. But the growth spurt it triggered had unintended consequences.

Within just a few years, LA was clamouring for more water and city fathers were eyeing a prize they thought would last them hundreds of years; the wild and seemingly boundless Colorado River.

This is not a history lesson, it’s a warning. You see, the Colorado River basin is in big trouble. And, if we’re not fast, the story of the Owens Valley could be a microcosm for what comes next.

Stealing the future in the name of the future

Today Owens is a very different place from the apple and pear orchards it was before LA’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) bought up its water. The once 110-acre Owens Lake has all but dried up. It’s kept barely alive with only as much water as LA gives back to reduce the immense clouds of lung-damaging dust (including arsenic) which was being whipped up and showered on towns downwind.

When the valley first dried up, furious local ranchers repeatedly dynamited the pipeline and even laid siege to the aqueduct gates, diverting water flows back into the lake for a short period before LA police showed up with machine guns. The ranchers were no match for the DWP, and the die was cast.

In his fascinating book and later PBS series, Cadillac Desert, author Marc Reisner describes how the Owens project opened the way for wilder and wilder ideas for watering the seemingly unliveable deserts of the southwest – from nuclear powered desalination to diverting water thousands of miles from Alaska.

In the end though, it was the Colorado which bore the brunt. Dammed to create America’s two largest reservoirs, it supplied enough water and power to turn deserts into lush agricultural fields and built great cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas.

The world’s most ‘over-allocated’ river

According to Reisner’s assessment, the Colorado is now the ‘most controlled, litigated, domesticated, regulated and over-allocated river in the history of the world’. And, like Owens, today’s Colorado is a shadow of its former self. It no longer reaches the sea and year on year lakes Mead and Powell risk dropping too low to generate electricity. If Mead reaches ‘dead pool’ level, water can not pass through the Hoover dam into the Grand Canyon.

If you need a poster child for man’s incompetence in managing his most precious resource, how about that for an image?

How can the world’s most advanced economy have come to this? And, more importantly, what are we going to do about it? Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University and a former river guide, is in no doubt. “The only control we have over this river is the demand level. We have no control over the supply. We have to dial back demand,” he told CBS News (watch this, it’s an eye-opener).

Make no mistake. The violent unrest sparked over the loss of Owens Valley water was a walk in the park compared to what happens if the Colorado runs dry. And the effects won’t be limited to the seven riparian states. The basin ‘slakes the thirst of over 40 million people, irrigates an area the size of New Hampshire and fuels a $1.4 trillion dollar economy’. Without it, there is no American Southwest. Water security equals national security.

Wet winter aside, the danger remains real

But there are some positive signs. Last May, the three lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona agreed to conserve nearly a trillion gallons of water by the end of 2026, hoping the unprecedented cutback will help stabilise the river. But don’t be lulled by reservoir rises from recent wet winters, as long as metro areas upstream keep taking more water the danger remains as real as ever.

The only answer is radical, inclusive collaboration on the common goal of dialling back demand on the Colorado. That means you, me, government, states, utilities and other non-traditional actors working together to deliver immediate quantifiable benefits at a watershed level. We could have less than five years. That’s less time than it took to build the Hoover dam.
The scale and pace required means a complete redesign of some traditional water management practices and assumptions which, with the double whammy of climate change and population growth, are now a busted flush.
New data-based technologies which can deliver this have always stumbled because public bodies on their own can lack the skills and flexibility to adopt them. Water utilities have a tendency to be stuck in entrenched practices which can make investors shy. But forward-thinking corporations are neither, and for them water replenishment and equity is rapidly becoming an existential decision.

I talk to corporate ESG leads regularly and they really get it. Some, like @Microsoft, are showing real leadership in the way it is bringing together utilities and community leaders together with creators of potentially transformative technologies to de-risk new approaches and realise local benefits on an unprecedented scale.

Water, United – a corporate-powered collaboration

Working with water strategist @Will Sarni of @Water Foundry, Microsoft’s Water Lead @Eliza Roberts, @PepsiCo’s Senior Global Climate & Water Solutions Director @David-Grant and @Oldcastle-Infrastructure, my company FIDO Tech has launched a collaborative approach to demand management in the Colorado river basin.

It started with our 10-year project to vastly reduce leakage in the water-stressed Phoenix, last year and is now being vastly and rapidly expanded. The Las Vegas Valley Water District has signed up and we are actively recruiting more.

FIDO’s unique ability to assess the volume of hidden underground leaks means that verified local results are delivered quickly and are quantified using the increasingly accepted method of volumetric water benefit accounting (VWBA).

This is more than just a project, it’s the birth of a movement. One which we hope will become a catalytic community for water. The theory is simple. The more people we can draw into this partnership (and others as they spring up around the globe) the more their potential for upskilling, education, communication and community action around all the elements of demand management and non-revenue water (NRW) which have confounded engineers for centuries. I am talking about theft, consumption profiling. You name it.

The Colorado River urgently needs a community like this and I am calling on all corporates in the basin to get on board and create the impetus to draw in others like their lives depended on it.

The Colorado River Basin catalytic community for water scarcity was officially launched at GreenBiz24 in Desert Ridge, Phoenix on February 14, 2024.

Contact me if you are a corporate, ESG lead, Colorado-dependent community leader, utility, representative or anyone who wants to be part of this initiative.