Water

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You're dreaming. You're in your getaway cabin by the lake, a two-hour drive from your hectic job in Midwest City. You fall asleep Friday night dreaming about catching that trophy-sized trout you almost hooked five years ago. You start off toward the bluff at the shoreline to have a closer look, but it's not there. The lake is gone! In its place is a boulder field of gravel and mud. The twenty-foot ridge that marked the shoreline has tumbled into the lakebed.

You wake up and rush over to your neighbor Bob's place to get your bearings straight.

" This is Ohio, right?" You ask.

Bob takes a long look at you, standing in his driveway with your fishing pole and tackle box. He's puzzled.

"No, son," he says. "This is New Mexico."

Shifting ground and vanishing rivers are not uncommon here. Throughout the long history of human settlement in this high desert, people have been adjusting to fickle currents of floods and droughts.

The Rio Grande is a case study in dynamic juxtapositions. In an area that receives 4 or five inches of rainfall per year, valley acreage is saturated or inundated with water.

The river is not a river for most of its length, but a shifting archipelago of sandbars. A survey conducted by the USGS in 1907 reported that "…the river carries, on the average, 14,580 acre-feet of mud a year, or enough when dry to cover 14,580 acres 1 foot deep." In the years between 1880 and 1928, increasing sedimentation raised the riverbed as much as 12 to 14 feet.¹ ¹Report of the Chief Engineer, State of New Mexico Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, 1928.

The diminished Rio Grande ranged restlessly across the floodplain. The same report estimated that land under irrigation decreased from 124,800 acres to 40,000 by 1925. In the growing commercial center of Albuquerque, a flood in 1874 destroyed almost every building between Alameda and Barelas.² ²Irrigation in the Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico; A Study of the Development of Irrigation Systems Before 1945. Frank E Wozniak, US Bureau of Reclamation, 1987.

These rogue elements, water, soil and wind, became unacceptable variables for agriculture, transportation and the growing urban population. The mandate for control produced the State's largest engineering project of the last century. In the Middle Rio Grande District, which encompasses the Albuquerque metroplex, 4 diversion dams, 400 miles of drains, 834 miles of canals and lateral ditches and 150 miles of levees were built to solve "the river problem". Although much of the work was done in the 1930's and qualifies as historic, the problem persists. The struggle for control runs the length of the river from Colorado to Mexico, between farming, Pueblo and urban populations, between state and federal authorities, between commercial constituents and environmentalists.

Frank Wozniak concludes:

"Many of the old problems of flooding, sedimentation, waterlogging, alkali poisoning, and unreliable water supply were resolved or at least held in check, but they were replaced by new problems related particularly to finances, especially maintenance costs and reimbursement of construction costs. The new problems have proved to be much more intractable than the old ones."

In 1947 Omar "The Tentmaker" Barker announced in the El Paso Herald-Post that "..New Mexico has plains so flat that the State Highway Department has to put up signs to show the water which way to run when it rains;…" If only that were so.

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