Subject: MXUS: Rio Grande down to a trickle
Date: Jun 27, 2001 @ 21:06
Author: Bill Hanrahan (Bill Hanrahan <hanrahan@...>)
Prev Post in Topic Next
Prev Post in Time Next
Jun 27, 2001
The Once-Mighty Rio Grande Is Just
a Pathetic Trickle by the Time It Reaches the Gulf of Mexico
By Lynn Brezosky
Associated Press Writer
BOCA CHICA STATE PARK, Texas (AP) - The once-mighty Rio Grande is so
tapped out is doesn't even reach the Gulf of Mexico anymore.
Nine years of drought, a proliferation of choking river weeds and the
drawing off of water by farms and municipalities have taken their toll on
the nation's second-largest river, which serves as the boundary between
Mexico and the United States.
Once a navigable waterway that swelled under bridges and made fertile an
otherwise dry coastal plain, the river becomes a mere trickle before it
gets to the Gulf of Mexico, disappearing about 300 feet short of its
destination in a big expanse of sand.
The actual U.S.-Mexico border is now marked by a few sticks in that sand.
"My parents are still alive - Dad is 83, Mom 76. They've never heard
of something like this," U.S. Border Patrol agent Reynaldo Guillen
said.
Would-be illegal immigrants need only walk up the beach that used to be
an estuary to reach the border, where U.S. agents are posted to stop them
from coming across. Horses and cattle can wander across, meaning added
work for the "tick patrol," federal agents known to lasso
animals that may be carrying fever ticks that could devastate U.S.
livestock.
The sandbar replaced the river mouth around March and has continued to
grow. The river ends in a placid, almost crystalline pool on the Mexican
side, so shallow that Mexicans have taken to wading around the water with
fishing poles.
The river creates an approximately 2,000-mile border between Texas and
Mexico, serving as a gateway for North American Free Trade Agreement
commerce. It serves roughly 1 million people on each side of the border,
with agricultural interests and municipalities drawing from the river in
a complex system of 1,600 water-rights accounts.
Old photos show a river deep enough and wide enough at its mouth for
ocean-going ships. At Brownsville, which is about 10 miles from the Gulf,
the water was about 100 feet across decades ago. Now it is down to maybe
15 or 20 feet across. Sometimes it goes dry altogether.
Grain sorghum, cotton and corn fields - mostly on the Mexican side of the
border - are wilting, in part because of the lack of irrigation water.
For several days in May, water released from the Falcon Dam just south of
Laredo did not reach Matamoros, Mexico, the last city to receive Rio
Grande water, causing at least 100,000 city taps to run dry. Matamoros
officials are now talking about rationing.
At Falcon Dam, the water is so low that the rubble of towns that were
flooded when the dam was built in 1953 has emerged from the depths. Some
people on the Mexican side have even moved into the homes.
There is no talk of dredging. The official solution seems to be to await
a tropical storm or hurricane, for which South Texas is long overdue.
Such storms, which tend to occur during the summer and early fall, can
provide enough water to fill the Rio Grande and its dams.
The situation for U.S. farmers and municipalities may improve by the end
of July, when Mexico is due to release half of the nearly 500 billion
gallons of river water it owes the United States under a water-sharing
treaty.
One problem is the nonnative hyacinth and hydrilla, weeds that have no
natural predator in the Rio Grande. Since Mexico will not agree to the
chemical controls U.S. officials have suggested, machines may be brought
in to tear out some of the weeds. But they are expected to grow back.
Environmentalists are concerned about the loss of the estuary, a
sheltered area where saltwater mixes with fresh to create a natural
nursery for shrimp and other marine life.
"As water evaporates it will get hypersaline. All the freshwater
stuff will die," University of Texas marine biology professor Paul
Montagna said. "It's become more like a stagnant lake than a river.
Any organisms that need to use this as a nursery can't get out."
The shrimp loss already is noticeable, said Tony Reisinger, marine
extension agent with Texas A&M University at Edinburg.
Environmentalists say now is the time to revamp international water-use
plans to protect natural resources.
"I think it'd be a blessing if we did have a (weather) event, but in
the long run we are going to have to plan," Reisinger said.
"The major user of water here is agriculture. Some of the transport
methods are antiquated - open canals, ditches with high evaporation rates
and a lot of leakage. I think they could probably start there and save
enough water."