GILA River — Contents

Activities

Gila River Media Coverage

Gila Conservation Coalition

The wild Gila River deserves Wild and Scenic River designation to permanently protect it. Please weigh in with our congressional delegation. https://www.nmwild.org/gila-wild-scenic-campaign/

Activities

Poster Submission - October, 2020

Norm Gaume and Peter Coha's criticisms of the Gila Diversion and Storage Project since 2014 were based on their water yield modeling. As the basis of their detailed comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement in June 2020, they obtained and operated the Bureau of Reclamation's yield model. They recently were approved to present the poster linked below at the 65th annual New Mexico Water Conference. The poster contains a high level summary of the 27 pages of public comments they submitted to Reclamation and the State of New Mexico in June.

Reclamation's published water yield amounts and costs misleadingly made the project look much better than Reclamation's non-public model showed it would be.

  • Reclamation's model showed 396 consecutive days in 2012 and 2013 would have had no project water, making the project unsuitable to irrigate pecan orchards. Pecan orchards were presumed to be 25% of the irrigated crops, producing higher farm income than the other crops.

  • Reclamation disregarded climate change entirely. Reclamation's model simulated water yield using unrealistically low historical evaporation rates that falsely declined with time.

  • The draft EIS and model together are an example of "information disorder," as defined in a graphic from the Scientific American, Sept 2019 issue.

  • Overall poster conclusion: "Reclamation’s draft EIS and technical memoranda withheld or misrepresented pertinent modeling results, violating scientific integrity and information integrity essential to democracy and NEPA compliance."

A Critical Review of Reclamation’s Water Yield Modeling for the New Mexico Unit of the Central Arizona Project - Norm Gaume, P.E. (ret.) and Peter Coha

Submitted to 65th Annual New Mexico Water Conference, Oct. 26-29, 2020 sponsored by New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute at NMSU