interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Managing The Unavoidable
by Michael Brumage
April 1, 2020
This interview with Michael Brumage, the Medical Director of Cabin Creek Health System and Program Director of Public Health/General Preventive Medicine Residency at WVU School of Public Health, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: Thank you for speaking with us Michael. Will you tell us about your background?
Michael Brumage: My name is Michael Brumage, I'm an MD and I have a master's in public health. Currently I'm the medical director for Cabin Creek Health Systems. I'm also the program director for the general preventive medicine residency at West Virginia University in the school of public health.
I am a native West Virginian. I went to undergraduate and medical school at West Virginia University.
How did you get your start working on pandemics?
I started by working in internal medicine for the United States Army and later became a preventive medicine physician. From 2005 to 2007, I was the chief of preventive medicine at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. While I was in that job, I wore two other hats, one as the public health emergency officer, PHEO, for the Pacific Regional Medical Command, and PHEO for Joint Task Force-Homeland Defense, which covered all the U.S.-affiliated islands in the Pacific. I was up to my neck in pandemic planning.
At the time we were planning for Influenza A H5N1, the “bird flu”, the highly pathogenic avian influenza we worried would become the next pandemic virus. Fortunately, it never acquired the characteristics to spread easily from person to person. While it had a very high mortality rate, it didn’t spread easily. I understood what was at stake from the very beginning of this current pandemic.
How so?
I had hoped that our government would have been more proactive in seeing the danger and expressing that to the American people, and that did not happen. Now we have to make really hard decisions about what price we're going to pay. In places like New York City, Seattle, Boston, we are reaching the capacity of our healthcare system and may soon overrun it.
How will this affect rural communities, like yours in West Virginia?
We have to consider how we can prevent the spread to rural areas of the United States. Where we are in West Virginia, we serve people from all walks of life, but are primarily in underserved areas. We have clinics in formerly very heavy coal producing areas, and we deal with a lot of chronic illnesses like heart disease, lung diseases, and diabetes.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently did a study evaluating at-risk populations for a pandemic.
We are not only dealing with individual human beings that have chronic medical illnesses, but also Hepatitis B and C, and HIV cases related to intravenous drug use. In addition to these problems we now have to address a pandemic that strains our own internal capacity. What's most concerning to me is that we are working with very high-risk populations for complications from coronavirus.
How do you prepare for a pandemic in the face of that reality?
As the medical director, my effort in the last couple of weeks has been almost solely focused on preparing Cabin Creek Health Systems for a pandemic, which includes 11 sites in Kanawha County. We've been preparing to try to segregate people with respiratory symptoms away from other patients, moving toward deferring visits that do not require an in person visit, and trying to shift more to telephone and telemedicine to care for patients. We will still need to see patients in person for a variety of issues.
Yesterday I was in clinic for the first time in a while and actually swabbed someone for COVID-19. He had been on a cruise with two other family members with upper respiratory symptoms. I tested him for COVID-19 after donning personal protective equipment and administered the nasopharyngeal swab. We will find out the results in a few days.
This has been the pressing issue for me: worrying about a pandemic with the background of people in a state that ranks first in almost every bad category of health indicators, and usually bottom three for every good category of health outcomes.
If it hits here the way it does in other places, we're soon going to be out of ICU capacity and hospital bed capacity. There may be difficult triage decisions made for people to access care.
One advantage I think we have is that we are rural. People either live on ridge tops or they live in the hollows and that tends to create its own capability for social distancing. Whether you're in rural America or urban America, you're going to do pretty well if you practice social distancing. The question is whether or not we have the discipline to maintain social distancing, and biting the bullet on economic damage that it is going to do.
The case number is currently low in West Virginia. How are people responding in a place that is not visibly taken by the virus?
First of all, we don't really know how many cases there are. This is a huge blind spot everywhere in the United States, and here in West Virginia as well. While we know we have eight cases [on 3.21.20], I think everybody in public health understands that the real number of cases out there is much, much higher.
We are really like soldiers on a battlefield in a fog. We know the enemy is out there, but we don't know their strength in numbers.
I think many people here, from what I can gather from social media, are still in disbelief that this is as bad as it was because of messaging that came from some conservative media sources and the message that was coming from the White House for some time. I think the lingering effect of that is that there are many people who don't take it seriously. Two days ago, I went to a supermarket and I still saw people walking out with rolls of toilet paper under each arm, which I can't comprehend because there is no toilet paper shortage. And instead of just getting in and out with their toilet paper, I saw people congregating in the parking lot having discussions, which is an anathema to what we should be doing right at the moment.
Right. There is something strange about going to a store right now, without knowing what the future looks like – even with all the information I have, I pause and think, do I need more stuff?
Definitely. That attitude can be very contagious.
When we look to countries ahead of us chronologically, how can we use their experiences as a model?
If we stop and take a look around the world and how different people handled it, we're going to find success stories that could help lead us to a better place. One is China.
Because they have much more authority to enforce disciplined public health measures than we do in Western democracies, they were able to clamp down very rigidly on their population. This sort of radical social distancing and enforcement of quarantine seems to have worked in China. I think they may be out of the woods, depending on how they manage the subsequent waves of disease that are inevitably coming. While there may be no more new domestic cases, China is very connected to the rest of the world and can import cases.
Then you have South Korea. South Korea was an early leader in terms of number of cases and number of deaths. The Korean CDC is a capable and intelligent organization. They rapidly deployed testing kits and identified the people at risk and tested them. Whoever was positive, was isolated immediately. This is very widespread, population-based testing, an aggressive management of the disease seems to be flattening the curve in South Korea. They seem to be a model we can follow. In general, South Korea looks a lot more like Western countries politically, than they do a rigid, authoritarian country like the People’s Republic of China.
Part of this is buying time everyday so we can slow the spread and allow industry to catch up, to allow research to catch up, and to implement widespread testing. This will really make a major difference in our response.
What can we expect given our current reality?
My concern is what frequently happens when you start to get success is that you become complacent. I anticipate we will eventually succeed in controlling this in some manner or another. The reality of the situation is going to hit home, even for the people who are still out there in denial. I anticipate that over the summer months, the disease will wane and give us the sense of security that we've kind of got this thing under control.
People from all over the country are going to descend on campuses and share their viruses, which happens every year. This could reignite the whole situation. That’s why we really need to have a much tighter testing regimen in place by fall. We can buy time through the summer months and become very aggressive about developing testing, including point of care testing. There's a difference between what we're doing now with testing, which is the nasopharyngeal swabs and sending it off to a lab for evaluation, and things like the rapid flu test, which we can do in an office setting in about 30-45 minutes. We have a similar test already for influenza. In those cases we test, keep the patient in the office and tell them whether or not they have influenza. A similar test for coronavirus would be ideal. I believe it could be a prerequisite that the student body and the faculty would have to be tested and be certain they were negative before returning to campus.
Coronaviruses are not new to the United States. There are at least three other coronaviruses that show up in our communities and present like a common cold. What we are concerned about here is the more pathogenic and dangerous COVID-19 virus. We need a test that could be easily administered, and then we need to be able to isolate the positive cases that do come back away from the population.
In some ways, it's like when you think you've put out the forest fire, but those smoldering embers lying in wait can help reignite the fire all over again. My greater concern over the long term is that we become complacent and that this disease makes a resurgence in the fall months.
Data is finally emerging, but I feel like data is only as useful as the person interpreting it. How are you reading what comes out of China, Italy, or South Korea?
Data is also only as good as the people collecting it, and what they are collecting.
There's a lot that comes into play here. So again, South Korea has done much broader testing, they're identifying the less symptomatic cases, as well as the extremely ill cases. The last time I looked, the fatality rate was 0.8%.
Italy on the other hand, is not doing the broad-based testing. It could be that their case fatality rate is in fact higher because they can't deliver the level of care required to every person coming in because they're making triage decisions – literally who's going to live and die. Because they are in this dire situation where they have outstripped their capacity, people who might have survived previously are no longer given that opportunity because there's not enough intensive care unit beds, ventilators, and intensive care unit staff. We have to look at all the data from a wide variety of angles.
What is the real number? I'm looking at the South Korean model as the most accurate, even though it's probably not perfect. If we can drive the case fatality rate down to 0.8% that means: a), we're doing enough testing and b), we're maintaining our capacity to care for those who are extremely ill.
What else do we need to pay attention to right now?
One is that we have to plan ahead for vaccine distribution. We know when this vaccine is finally produced, we are not going to have enough for everybody, and it's going to be available gradually as production increases. People like health care workers and first responders are going to be among the first in line. People at highest risk of disease are going to be next in line. We have to begin to communicate those priorities well in advance, in order to prevent public panic.
The communication has to be clear.
One of the most touching things I saw in relation to pandemic preparedness was a mass vaccination on Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In 2007 and 2008, the Department of Defense received an excess of flu vaccine they were planning on paying a company to destroy. At the same time there were people in places like the Pacific US territories that weren't getting enough. I thought, we have this need in the Western Pacific, so why not use it? I was able to get it shipped out and used as part of the community's pandemic planning.
How do we plan for a mass vaccination?
Ultimately, that's going to come down to planning at the local level. That means local health departments and hospitals and other health organizations will have to collaborate with law enforcement to set up mass vaccination sites that may include drive-through vaccination clinics where you are.
Got it.
I wanted to mention that at the end of this, we have to ask ourselves, “How could we let our public health system fail the way it did?”
When it comes to a pandemic, you see how the system has failed because it was underfunded and under-resourced at the federal, state, and local levels for many years. We often boast that we have the best healthcare system in the world. That myth is busted if we are failing even the doctors, nurses, and other staff on the front lines of this pandemic without adequate personal protective equipment. How could this be allowed to happen when we knew that a pandemic would eventually hit?
I was just listening to NPR on the way to talk to you and I heard somebody talking about how a pandemic bears a similarity to earthquakes, another periodic natural event. If you live in Los Angeles, you know that the big one is coming sooner or later. We knew pandemics were coming. It was inevitable. And yet we were so ill prepared for this.
We have to reimagine how we view health. We have typically viewed health through the lens of health care, when we know about factors called the social determinants of health that account for 80% of a population’s health. I'm talking about things like employment, economy, education, housing, transportation. All of these things play together in the health of people. The growing homeless problem you have in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, and even here in Charleston, West Virginia is a nationwide phenomenon, and these are people who are at high risk for all kinds of bad health outcomes. We are together only as healthy as the least healthy among us. They are the weak links in the chain of health. We have to have the view that we are interconnected.
We need to be prepared for the next pandemic that will inevitably come, and look at health from a holistic perspective. At the social services, at education. All of these things are crucial determinants of health for our nation and for our planet. If we fail to do that, then we have fundamentally failed to learn the lessons of this pandemic.
You’re so right about LA – it's cognitive dissonance. It's too big to wrap your head around. Right now there’s no looking away. Hopefully we use the opportunity as you suggest.
You nailed it. This cognitive dissonance is so true. We can't ignore it, and we're all paying the price for all of the weaknesses in our chain of health, in our chain of healthcare, and in our failure to plan for the inevitable. I think it's just such a profound quote from Tom Friedman who said, “We have to manage the unavoidable to avoid the unmanageable.”
And I thought, wow, that's really the whole pandemic in a nutshell. We have to face what's clearly in front of us. We can no longer look away, otherwise, we are setting up future generations for a failure on the scale that we see today.