Column: The fight over the Colorado River is a 100-year-old interstate grudge match

The year was 1934 and the place was the construction site of Parker Dam, downstream from the nearly completed Hoover Dam.

Over the last century, California has fought fiercely to preserve its legally sanctioned right to 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year. Reflecting the long history of contention, the Colorado River Board of California, which drafted the plan, was — shall we say? — less than entirely gracious toward the other states, especially Arizona, when itNoting that California had worked for years to reach shortage-sharing agreements among its own competing agricultural, urban and environmental stakeholders, board Chairman J.B. Hamby wrote that “California’s intrastate agreements are not well understood outside of California.

It’s worth going back in time to revisit the origins of the interstate friction. The impetus for the giant dam on the Colorado came from California farmers in the Imperial Valley, whose livelihoods had been almost destroyed by a flood in 1905-06 caused by the incompetent construction of a canal to bring irrigation water west from the river.A desalination project in Huntington Beach is the wrong idea in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To his dismay, the Californians rose together and stomped out of the room — forcing Hoover to follow them out the door, pleading with them to stay. As it happened, his threat worked: The next day, the seven state delegations approved the final draft of the Colorado River Compact, along with a separate resolution urging “the early construction of works in the Colorado River to control the floods” as a nonbinding sop to California.

Henceforth, all the conflicts over water in California and the West — between cities and farms, humid regions and desert zones, Southern and Northern California — would be adjudicated in the Washington office of the secretary of the Interior. For decades, successive Interior secretaries have tried to hand that responsibility back to the states, but almost invariably they have to step in and impose some sort of order.

hiltzikm The year is 2023. Alvarado/Wilshire L.A.

hiltzikm Oh Gawd, again. I commented about this before. They are/watched it run dry for years, and now ah shit....we need water🤣🤣🤣🤣

and? another stroking episode made by government's corruption. a diversion to the many crimes made upon you. our own governance has made war upon you and this is only a symptom . Water management has been ignored for years along with our constitution and laws by the elite class

Just close the dam and let the lake fill back up. Problem solved.

CA needs to do its part to live up to its calls for a Green New Deal. That is, design a rainwater capture system that can provide much needed water to residents/farmers, instead of draining the Colorado River, thereby depriving people in 7 other states the water they need.

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