Good deal for the state on Colorado River

Sometimes, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, a miracle wouldn’t hurt.

OK, the massive amounts of rain and snow the Western United States, and particularly California, received this past winter and spring isn’t perhaps a true miracle of biblical proportions.

But, the flooding and destruction and general mushroom-dampness of our lives aside, the 30-plus inches of precipitation we received in Southern California and the much higher numbers in the Sierra and other mountain ranges sure was sweet, coming as it did on the tail of years of devastating drought.

Now, the reservoirs that were at near-record emptiness are full. The underground aquifers that provide for much of our agricultural and household water supply are being replenished. The snowpack, the spring and summer melting of which provides another great percentage of our water needs, is — again, somewhat miraculously — not coming down off the mountain tops in disastrously sudden ways thanks to the cool May weather we’ve been having.

But when it comes to helping get a small way to solving that seemingly intractable problem of the Western states divvying up the crucial water we all get from the Colorado River, the miracle was essential.

In an agreement announced Monday after long negotiations between the states and the federal government, Arizona, California and Nevada say that they will voluntarily begin to take significantly less water from the parched Colorado — again, because, happily, we can — so that the river’s levels don’t fall so low as to jeopardize future water supplies for metropolises such as Los Angeles and Phoenix and for the states’ desert farmlands.

Along with all the downpours, the agreement is made possible by the federal government paying some $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states when they use less water over the next three years, about 13% less.

That’s the good news. The bad news is certainly that this is a temporary fix, expiring at the end of 2026. There’s every chance that at that time — depending on rainfall and snowfall over the next three rainy seasons — the Colorado River will be in as much or more trouble as it is now. But we’ll take the temporary victory, given the alternative.

We think that for our state in particular, this looks like a good deal. We’re especially pleased that the agreement is a voluntary one, avoiding costly litigation or federal edicts. In fact, about the only interested parties complaining about the deal are a few environmental groups, which basically don’t want people to have more water in the first place, preferring hyper-conservation and the loss of significant portions of our agricultural output instead.

As John Fleck, formerly a reporter at some of these newspapers and for 25 years an environmental writer for the Albuquerque Journal, wrote in his book “Water is for Fighting Over,” “It’s time to stop fighting over water and turn our attention to another adage Mark Twain likely never said: ‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started.’ When we start talking, we can learn to share our beloved but dwindling Colorado River in a changing world.”

It looks for the time being as if the infamous Arizona Navy, which declared martial law in 1934 to try to stop Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District’s Parker Dam on the Colorado, will not again have to be deployed in a war between the states. Eighty-nine years ago, about 100 Arizona National Guard troops “acquired two ferry boats owned by Nellie T. Bush, a famous steamboat captain and Arizona state legislator (as well as the temporary admiral of the ‘Arizona Navy,’” as the science website Earth reports. The soldiers set up camp around the dam site, halting construction, but their boats “got tangled in some cables and had to be rescued by enemy forces.” The dam was eventually built.

Here’s hoping the successful negotiations between the states, the feds and the water agencies continue, and that the rains continue to pour down.