The once-mighty Rio Grande is barely a trickle through much of West Texas. Scientists and advocates say local initiatives could be scaled up to restore flows to the river, Martha Pskowski reports for Inside Climate News.
In Mexico, the Rio Grande is known as the Rio Bravo—the rough, or wild, river—signifying the force that caused several devastating floods in El Paso and neighboring Ciudad Juárez. Today these historic floods are hard to imagine. The river channel in El Paso-Juárez now only fills during the irrigation season. Further downstream, the river is frequently dry in a 200-mile section known as the Forgotten Reach.
For millions of years, the flow of the Rio Grande in present-day New Mexico and West Texas was dictated by two natural cycles. Spring snowmelt in Colorado sent water rushing downstream, triggering floods throughout the watershed. In the summer, the monsoon dumped rain on the desert and swelled the river. These annual “pulses” of water sustained biodiverse ecosystems in the arid Chihuahuan Desert.
These cycles came to an end in the early twentieth century. In 1916, the Bureau of Reclamation completed Elephant Butte Dam outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Its 301-foot retaining wall captured the crush of water coming out of the mountains. The dam released water on a precise schedule for farmers farther down the river. The three cities immediately downstream—El Paso, Las Cruces and Ciudad Juárez—continued to grow.
The Rio Grande Compact—signed in 1938 between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas—sealed the river’s fate. The compact ensured that farmers in all three states would get their share of water. But there was no obligation to guarantee water flowed beyond the last irrigation district south-east of El Paso, at a point called Fort Quitman. The once-mighty Rio Grande began to dry up downstream of that now abandoned ghost town.
Read the full story on Inside Climate News
