The first agreement was signed in a hotel conference room, four pages long, and never entered into the public registry. By the time the third was signed, the language had been refined to a single sentence that committed the Velden basin to deliveries it could not sustain in a dry year.

There would be eleven dry years out of the next fourteen.

The documents — allocation memoranda, internal forecasts, and minutes from a working group that formally never existed — show officials repeatedly warned that reserve margins were being sold faster than they could be replenished. The warnings were annotated, initialed, and filed.

“We treated the reserve like a rounding error,” one former authority engineer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the settlement terms of his departure prohibit comment. “It was the whole ballgame.”

“We treated the reserve like a rounding error. It was the whole ballgame.”

The shortfall now amounts to roughly a fifth of summer demand across the three provinces, according to The Ledger’s analysis of delivery records — a figure the national regulator has not disputed.

What the records describe is not a conspiracy but a habit: a decade of small accommodations, each defensible in isolation, none ever totaled. The basin’s reserve margin was treated as negotiating room. The negotiating room was spent.

The authority’s former chief engineer kept a private ledger of the commitments — the only complete accounting that appears to exist. It runs to four handwritten pages. The official forecasts, by contrast, carried the reserve at full strength for nine consecutive years.

Asked whether the regulator had ever reconciled the two, a spokesman said the question “mischaracterizes the supervisory relationship.” He did not say how.