When U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman hailed the Drought Contingency Plans signed last year as “historic,” we wholeheartedly agreed. The plans were the product of years of discussion, negotiation and compromises among water users throughout the Colorado River Basin.
The water has made development possible and is used for farms, homes and businesses. Meanwhile, recreation has risen to over 4 million annual visitors in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, with tourists bringing in over $420 million to local communities.
Comments, questions and concerns are now being accepted, again, for the Lake Powell Pipeline. This comes after the Bureau of Reclamation issued the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the pipeline, which is designed to pump water to Washington County.
Any potential alignment of the Lake Powell pipeline would pass through lands that hold spiritual and cultural significance to Southern Paiutes, who fear the project would jeopardize their culture and upset the balance of nature.
In the arid West, scarce water supplies are growing scarcer. Climate change is shrinking snowpack in river basins throughout the region, leaving the future water supplies for cities, industries and farmers uncertain.
People generally think of the Lake Powell Pipeline as a southern Utah project, which it is. But we should not forget that the project, first conceived in 1995 and mandated by the 2006 Lake Powell Pipeline Development Act, would burden all Utahns.
Utah would bond for 50 years or more and Washington County would repay, only slowly, tying up much needed state funds at a time when the our ability to balance the budget will be challenging.
The water rights behind the proposed Lake Powell pipeline are not actually coming from the project’s namesake lake, but rather from the major reservoir upstream on the Green River.
Citing conservation gains and a third straw to the bottom of Lake Mead, the Southern Nevada Water Authority on Thursday voted to shelve a proposal for a multi-billion pipeline that would have moved water from Northern and Eastern Nevada to Las Vegas.
Sprawled across a desert expanse along the Utah-Arizona border, Lake Powell’s nearly 100-foot high bathtub ring etched on its sandstone walls belie the challenges of a major Colorado River reservoir at less than half-full. How those challenges play out as demand grows for the river’s water amid a changing climate is fueling simmering questions about Powell’s future.
As of Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s forecast for this year’s expected water supplies in the Colorado River is at 59% of average. That’s not good news.
If that prediction proves true, this will be one of the driest water years since Lake Powell was constructed nearly 60 years ago. The volume of water stored in Lake Powell each year is affected by three primary factors: the amount of water flowing into the reservoir after ‘Upper Basin‘ water users have extracted water for their use, minus water released from the reservoir to support Lower Basin water users, and minus evaporation from the reservoir itself. Lake Powell will lose – by my estimation — about 22 feet of water this year, or about 2.1 million acre-feet of storage.
At that point, the reservoir will be 60% empty.
