Who Drinks the River?

Who Drinks the River? is a single web page that combines an essay, an open model and a playable app about Colorado River water allocation, made by Anselm Hook and published under the Orbital Foundation GitHub organisation. The page opens on a satellite image of the dry delta, puts a map of the basin, tributaries and canals under the text, and runs a timeline from 1906 to 2056 with a seam at the present. Left of the seam is the Bureau of Reclamation's record of flow, reservoir storage and the promises made against it; right of the seam the same timeline is the model running forward under the reader's settings.

The author calls the form computational journalism: a live public argument, an open model and a page to play with, shipped together, chosen only for fights where a conserved and measured quantity like water lets a model settle something. The piece takes a claim from social media about cattle feed and alfalfa, shows the two denominators behind it (about half of direct human use, a third of total consumption, from the Richter 2024 water budget), and then hands over the levers: river flow as a share of the 2000 to 2024 average, how much cattle-feed and other irrigation to fallow or retire, urban conservation, and which rule decides who takes the cut (proportional, a stylised seniority, or the federal 2027 to 2028 framework). Retiring farmland is a one-way slider on purpose, to make irreversibility felt. Every configured future serialises into a shareable link.

It runs in the browser with no account. The code, the data pipelines (Richter 2024 tables, Lees Ferry natural flows) and a verification ledger are public in the repository, which also holds validation and backtest scripts against the 2000 to 2024 drawdown. The model is deliberately small: four parties, no groundwater, no return flows, no crop economics beyond published prices.

Status: a staged prototype, dated August 2026 on the page itself, with the essay marked a working draft. The author describes it as the first of a series of standalone pieces, with the Rio Grande named as the next.