The deadly winter storm that swept across Texas and parts of the South knocked out power and water for millions. It also created a catastrophe for animals statewide — including for sea turtles prone to freezing in frigid waters.
Bellamy, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and Haiti, spotted some turtles Tuesday with his son Jerome. But he needed help. He alerted Capt. Christopher Jason, the commander of Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in southeastern Texas, and his wife, Cheryl Jason. The commander grabbed his kayak, paddled into the cold waves and retrieved a lapful of cold-shocked turtles.
But the next day, on Bellamy’s turtle patrol, the situation became far more urgent, he said, and one that would require a lot more hands.
“It was like an apocalypse of turtles littered on the beach,” Bellamy told The Washington Post in a phone interview Thursday.
More than 1,100 turtles have since been plucked from Laguna Madre by a ragtag group of about 50 Navy pilots and flight students, military spouses, family members and military retirees, said Biji Pandisseril, the Navy installation’s environmental manager. More turtles are still coming in, he said, and some have died.
Green sea turtles, listed as a threatened species, feast on grasses found in the waters of Laguna Madre, but in winter weather, the chilling shallow water zaps strength from the coldblooded reptiles. They become immobile and unable to power their fins to warmer, deeper waters, putting them at risk of dying of predation or exposure, according to the National Park Service. Some wash ashore like driftwood.
Rescuing “cold-stunned” turtles has become an annual routine in Texas, with dozens or hundreds aided in a typical year, Sanjuana Zavala, a spokeswoman for the conservation group Sea Turtle Inc. told The Post.
But with the weather so much more severe, thousands of turtles have been rescued in the larger effort this week. Many could die if facilities that care for them don’t get power soon, the group has said.
Word spread in the military community, but the movement began with Bellamy flagging down motorists to help, he said. From there, the efforts mushroomed to a full-blown operation. Bellamy said one active duty Navy pilot trainee on scene called in other trainees with pickup trucks to haul the stunned turtles to heated storage facilities at the air station.
Jason kayaked out to distant turtles,while others used a more novel approach: wielding laundry baskets to corral them in shallow water.
The cold was a challenge for the humans, too, Bellamy said, but volunteers worked all day. One man waded into the surf with his blue jeans and cowboy boots, laser-focused on the rescue, he said.
The effort unfurled some challenges. Green sea turtles can grow to hundreds of pounds, and the bigger ones — coined “Big Bertha” — need two volunteers to handle. Arms and backs burned in the cold.
“These guys are a lot heavier than they look,” Bellamy said.
Back at the storage facility, the inevitable happened, Pandisseril said. The turtles, suddenly warmer, began moving — though, of course, a little slowly. The volunteers did their best to contain them for 24 hours, when they were handed off to Park Service officials, he said.
Pilot trainees started a rotating guard shift to watch over the turtles at night, Jason said.
The larger community at the air base has not been immune to the struggles millions of other Texans still face in the storm. Many of them had no heat or water in the past few days, Jason said.
“Most of these people didn’t have good conditions in their own homes,” he said. “But they came out to help.”
The hardships of the extreme weather, coupled with the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, compelled the volunteers to do something tangible and positive amid the bleakness, Bellamy said.
“Things have been rough over the past year. It’s fun to see people come together focused on recovering these turtles. People just need it.”
Water managers in the Upper Colorado River Basin know the number by heart: 3,525.
It refers to an elevation, a topographic ring around the shores and walls of Lake Powell, and it signals a crisis.
At 3,525 feet above sea level, the federally owned reservoir could only spare another 40-foot drop before reaching “dead pool”
— where power generation at the Glen Canyon Dam becomes impossible.
Below that lies a worst-case scenario where hundreds of billions of
gallons of water would be trapped with no easy way to release them into
the Grand Canyon below.
The reservoir is currently 40% full and its elevation is 50 feet above
3,525, but that level could be exposed in just a couple of bad snow
years in the river’s headwaters, given the continued demands of the 40
million people across seven states, two countries and 29 Native American
nations who rely on the river.
[…]
The question, and the point where consensus begins to fracture, is what to do.
Many see a need to continue what’s always been done in the river basin:
the hashing out of differences in board meetings and conference halls
[…].
Others hear a death knell for Glen Canyon Dam.
But another controversial vision has roared back to life in recent
months that would upend nearly a century and a half of precedent. Hedge
funds and other Wall Street interests want to rewrite the “Law of the
River” in the Colorado River Basin and use the free market to solve the
problem of scarcity — while potentially raking in immense profits.
Privatizing water resources has long been the dream of
l!bertarian-leaning think tanks, and publications from the F!nancial
Times to F0rbes
have referred to water as “the next oil.” If geopolitical conflicts and
vast swaths of the global economy in the 20th century were driven by
fossil fuels, some analysts predict a repeat in this century with a
different commodity.
Partners at Water Asset Management (WAM), a New York-based hedge fund
that invests in water around the world, have been involved with Western
water since the 1990s.
[…]
“I have seen time and again the wisdom of using incentives that attract
private-sector investment and innovation,” James Eklund, legal counsel
for WAM, recently told The New York Times.
[…]
Eklund formerly served as a top water negotiator for Colorado, and his comments in the article set off a flurry of rebuttals
[…].
WAM had invested $300 million in farmland in Colorado, California,
Arizona and Nevada as of last year, including $16.6 million on 2,220
acres of farmland with senior water rights in Colorado’s Grand Valley
just upstream from where the Colorado River crosses into Utah. So far,
farming has continued on the hedge fund’s plots in the Grand Valley
[…].
They also expect a hefty return on investment.The hedge fund’s
co-founder and president, Matthew D!ser!o, has called water in the
United States “a trillion-dollar market opportunity.” […]
D!sque De@ne Jr., another partner at WAM, told ProPublica in 2016 that he is interested in freeing up rules that regulate water trading.
Deane argued that commodifying water and making it a tradable asset on
the market would encourage conservation, rewarding those who cut back on
use and enabling them to sell it to others who would in turn be
encouraged to conserve during droughts.
[…]
The same report in The New York Times noted that lobbyists are pushing
for the creation of private “accounts” in Lake Powell, a move that would
partially privatize the federally owned reservoir. If that happened,
investors could theoretically dry up farmlands, which use the vast
majority of water in the basin, and store the savings in the reservoir
to sell to cities during shortages. Eklund has since denied that WAM’s goal is the creation of a private account
in Lake Powell, though the hedge fund has used rotational fallowing on
its farmland in Arizona to divert over 2 billion gallons to an account
in Lake Mead, according to a presentation one of its partners gave last year.
——-
Headline, image, caption, and text excerpt published by: Zak Podmore. “Exclusive: Hedge funds eye water markets that could net billions, as levels drop in Lake Powell.” The Salt Lake Tribune. 7 February 2021.
First screenshot (”The Colorado River forms 76 miles of the Reservation’s western border …”) from: Navajo Reservation profile, GRCA History, Arizona State University. Second screenshot (”Today, national media is focused on Navajo water insecurity …”) from: Andrew Curley. “Contested water settlements …” H/C/N. 11 August 2020.
