OCR Text |
Show is, a depletion of the stream by man's activities at the point of use, of 226,400 acre feet. That is a difference of about 120,000 acre feet per year. That is up at the point of use. Some of that difference, not all of it but some of that difference is due to the recognition of the salvage of water on the land itself, in other words, not charging Wyoming with water that was being consumed on the land in the state of nature. There is an additional salvage of channel losses from the state line to Lee Ferry of about 10,400 acre feet. So under the one theory Wyoming immediately would be charged with the 10,400 acre feet of present channel salvage loss plus some part of the 126,000 acre feet which represents salvage on the land. To illustrate further let us start with rainfall itself. If one has cisterns big enough to catch the rainfall before it started to run off he would salvage about eighty percent of the precipitation that falls on the watersheds. He would have about five times the amount of water that he now has to use if he could start the point where precipitation falls and catch it in cisterns and begin to utilize it. Mr. Wallace: What percentage of rainfall over the entire Colorado River Basin reaches the Mexican border? Can you make that calculation? Mr. Tipton : Mr. Wallace, I will not attempt to give you that for the entire basin. I can give you a rough estimate for the Upper Colorado River Basin. Taking a straight average of all of the recorded precipitation, without weighing it for areas, and multiplying that by the drainage area, the results indicate a total average precipitation a year in the Upper Basin of about 75,000,000 acre feet. The Engineering Advisory Committee estimates that the virgin runoff from the basin is slightly over 15,- |
Source |
Original book: [State of Arizona, complainant v. State of California, Palo Verde Irrigation District, Coachella Valley County Water District, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, City of Los Angeles, California, City of San Diego, California, and County of San Diego, California, defendants, United States of America, State of Nevada, State of New Mexico, State of Utah, interveners] : California exhibits. |