OCR Text |
Show APPENDIX J 301 Lower Basin to satisfy the award of 1,500,000 acre-feet to Mexico and 1,000,000 acre-feet to the Lower Basin. Furthermore, should the Lower Basin require an additional supply of water for agricultural and domestic purposes, the water stored in these reservoirs must be released. Under the Seven-state Compact the Upper states must deliver at Lee's Ferry in each ten-year period 75 million acre-feet to the Lower states and 7V2 million acre-feet to Mexico before they can use one drop of water themselves beyond what they used before the Seven-state Compact was ratified. In the current ten-year period that will leave only 3,250,000 acre-feet per year for their total use. In the previous ten-year period they would have had 4,150,000 acre-feet a year. In 1902 the Upper Basin states under this formula would have had no water at all. Unfortunately, the project is planned by the Reclamation Bureau on just the opposite of Governor Johnson's very fair assumptions: namely, the claim of a right to deprive the Lower Basin of all waters in the main stream in excess of 75,000,000 acre-feet in each ten-year period, which is twenty- five per cent less than the expectation under the interpretations of the Compact and Project Act on which this same Recla- mation Bureau relied in making water and power contracts in the Lower Basin, and in selling the Mexican Water Treaty to the Senate. This would happen at once, not in the distant future, because even if water should be accumulated in these giant upstream reservoirs only at the rate of two million acre- feet per year, all the main-stream surplus would be withheld from us in this manner for more than twenty-four years. During this period evaporation losses would account for another 20,000,000 acre-feet and be lost for power generation at Hoover Dam. Heavy Losses in Lower Basin: The loss of power revenues to the United States in the Lower Basin due to the construction and filling of the Upper Basin storage reservoirs, during the first twenty-five years, is estimated at about two hundred million dollars, with a corresponding loss of energy for the |