Abstract
The last time one state brandished arms against another was in 1934. The issue was water. Arizona Governor B. B. Moeur dispatched his executive assistant and 102 members of the Arizona National Guard to a godforsaken spot on the Arizona side of the Colorado River south of Parker. Armed with machine guns, rifles, and tear gas bombs, their mission was to dislodge four one-inch-thick cables that California had connected to the Arizona side to begin the construction of Parker Dam. The dam would divert water from the river into the proposed California Aqueduct. The Arizona troops commandeered two ferryboats, and the whole affair was written up in the Los Angeles Times as the hilarious misadventure of the Arizona Navy.
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Notes
- 1.
Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in different forms in Phoenix in Perspective, in “Watering the Sun Corridor,” and in Jack August and Grady Gammage Jr., “Shaped by Water: An Arizona Historical Perspective,” in Bonnie G. Colby and Katharine L. Jacobs, eds., Arizona Water Policy (Tucson, AZ: Resources for the Future, 2007).
- 2.
Sustainlane.com city rankings 2008. The sustainlane.com rankings appeared from 2005 to 2008.
- 3.
Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Arizona State University, Watering the Sun Corridor: Managing Choices in Arizona’s Megapolitan Area, August 2011. The City of Phoenix received ~186,000 acre-feet (AF) of Central Arizona Project water annually. (See: City of Phoenix Water Resources Plan [2011], https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/wsd2011wrp.pdf, 15–16.) On average, 50 percent of Phoenix’s water supply comes from the Salt-Verde System, 44 percent from CAP supplies, 3 percent from groundwater, and 3 percent from treated effluent (see: City of Phoenix Water Resources Plan [2011], 12). Annually, the Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA) uses about 2.3 mega-acre-feet (MAF), 1.6 MAF surface water, and 700,000 AF groundwater. See: http://www.azwater.gov/AzDWR/WaterManagement/AMAs/PhoenixAMA/PhxAMAWaterManagement.htm.
- 4.
Earl Zarbin, Two Sides of the River: Salt River Valley Canals, 1867–1902 (Phoenix, AZ: Salt River Project, 1997), 86–87.
- 5.
See: Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (New York: Penguin, 1992), 229.
- 6.
Zarbin, Two Sides of the River, 124, 143, 193.
- 7.
Ibid., 109–17, 177–91.
- 8.
Bradford Luckingham, Phoenix: The History of a Southwestern Metropolis (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 47.
- 9.
Ibid., 164.
- 10.
The upper basin includes Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and the portion of Arizona above Lee’s Ferry. The lower basin consists of the rest of Arizona, Nevada, and California.
- 11.
Thomas E. Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 222–27.
- 12.
On the CAP generally, see: Rich Johnson, The Central Arizona Project, 1918–1968 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977).
- 13.
Doug Kupel, Fuel for Growth: Water and Arizona’s Urban Environment (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2003), 175.
- 14.
Eric Holthaus, “Dry Heat,” Slate, May 8, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/arizona_water_shortages_loom_the_state_prepares_for_rationing_as_lake_mead.html.
- 15.
Testimony of Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke, US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, June 2, 2015, http://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=6fcd8b5d-b4cd-4956-b0e1-574bfc65ebb5; see also: Yuma Efficiency Study, HDR.
- 16.
Morrison Institute, Watering the Sun Corridor, 33–34.
- 17.
The surface water–groundwater distinction was “discovered” by ProPublica in July 2015 (Anna North, “California’s Big Groundwater Problem,” New York Times, July 22, 2015) as an example of apparent mismanagement by Arizona and California, purportedly the two states forcing the worst water crises. The article did recognize Arizona’s pioneering Groundwater Management Act, but made no mention of the groundwater replenishment the state has done.
- 18.
See, e.g.: C. A. Woodhouse, D. M. Meko, S. T. Gray, and J. J. Lukas, “Updated Stream Flow Reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River Basin,” Water Resources Research (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona, 2006); University of Arizona, “Historic Colorado River Stream Flows Reconstructed Back to 1490,” Science Daily, May 29, 2006.
- 19.
USBR Lower Colorado Region Basin Studies, US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, 2012, http://www.usbr.gov/lc/socal/basinstudies/, accessed November 3, 2015.
- 20.
Ordinance No. 4634, City of Chandler, http://www.chandleraz.gov/content/20150528_6.PDF, accessed June 1, 2015.
- 21.
Patricia Gober, Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
- 22.
See, e.g.: American Housing Survey, 2011, US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/ahs/publications/ahs11-21.pdf, accessed October 28, 2015.
- 23.
See: City of Mesa, Arizona, High Water Use Action Plan, http://mesaaz.gov/home/showdocument?id=7460, accessed October 28, 2015.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Caitlin McGlade, “Why Our Water-Saving Ways in Metro Phoenix May Not Result in Lower Bills,” Arizona Republic, October 30, 2015, 1; the article cites a recent study by Montgomery and Associates.
- 26.
Tucson hydrologist and water policy expert Gary C. Woodard cites personal surveys in the Tucson area for the artificial turf–canine link.
- 27.
See: “Tempe Town Lake Dam Bursts, Flooding River Bed,” CBS News, July 21, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/21/national/main6698274.html.
- 28.
Professor Nan Ellin, now at the University of Utah, while at Arizona State University led an effort called “Canalscape” to try to transform the canals of Phoenix, which, as she pointed out, has more miles of canals than does Venice.
- 29.
See: “Water and Wastewater Service Pricing in Arizona: 2013–2014 Rates Survey Results,” University of North Carolina Environmental Finance Center, 2014.
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Gammage, G. (2016). Just Add Water. In: The Future of the Suburban City. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-624-0_2
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