After Years Of Warnings, CO River Tier 1 Emergency Ends Water Service To Unincorporated AZ Township
Late last year, Leigh Harris logged onto a local Facebook group and learned that she and her neighbors were about to lose their water — for good. Harris lives in an area called Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated expanse of dirt roads and horse farms on the outskirts of Scottsdale, Arizona, a city that is itself on the outskirts of Phoenix. The neighborhood sprung up during the housing boom of the early 2000s, but it lacked robust water access, so residents like Harris relied on private “water haulers” to bring them water from nearby Scottsdale. Every few days a truck bearing a shipment of water from a city facility drove to Harris’ house and pumped water into a four-thousand-gallon tank behind her property. She tapped the tank until it ran out, then paid to get more. This time, though, her water hauler was the one tapping out: The company posted on Facebook to say it would stop serving Rio Verde Foothills at the end of 2022. The other haulers in the area are quitting as well, because Scottsdale decided to stop allowing haulers to bring water to customers who live outside the city limits, including the hundreds of people in Rio Verde Foothills.
The city’s decision was a direct result of the federal government declaring what’s known as a Tier 1 water shortage on the Colorado River last year. The Colorado is hundreds of miles away from Scottsdale, but the city relies on the river for around 70 percent of its water, which travels across the width of the state on the 336-mile Central Arizona Project canal. The federal government financed the construction of the canal, and in return Arizona agreed to have the most junior rights of any state that uses the river, which means now the state is taking an 18 percent reduction in water deliveries to accommodate the ongoing drought. Cities that rely on Colorado water are scrambling to retrench their water usage so their own residents don’t suffer during future cuts. In Scottsdale, that means cutting off the haulers who brought water to Rio Verde.
The city had been warning about the shutoff for years, but the formal announcement set off a neighborhood-wide scramble to find an alternate water source. If the issue isn’t resolved before the end of the year, hundreds of residents in the area will lose their water access altogether, making their brand-new ranch homes both unlivable and virtually impossible to sell. The neighborhood’s water shutoff portends a much larger crisis caused by the climate change-enhanced megadrought in the American West, which experts say has no precedent in the past 1200 years.
Arizona and other states across the West have built millions of new homes over the past few decades on the assumption that they could find enough water to support them. Now both surface water and groundwater sources are proving less reliable than earlier generations had assumed, and this longtime growth spurt may be faltering in its tracks. “We have no water rights whatsoever, except to the aquifer beneath our home, which is highly stressed,” said Harris, a retired TV news producer who moved out to the area with her husband so they could be close to their favorite hiking trails.
EDIT
https://grist.org/housing/rio-verde-foothills-arizona-water-megadrought/
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