Come spring, the American West’s vast water reservoirs are supposed to fill with melting snow. However this year, as in recent years, the large reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the Colorado River basin have seen declining water levels — an ominous trend that a new study warns could signal a looming megadrought.
A dry April caused the expected spring-summer runoff into Lake Powell to plunge dramatically, with the water-flow forecast down the Colorado River declining as much in one month as Tucson Water customers use in 10 years.
A longtime water conservation advocate says Arizona and the other Lower Colorado River Basin states need to cut their water use more and faster.
Sustainable Waters president Brian Richter says Arizona, California, and Nevada need to slash total water use by 18% from their 2000-2018 average to bring Lakes Mead and Powell into a long-term state of balance, the Arizona Daily Star reports. He says the decrease would push the river’s falling reservoirs into sustainability.
Water managers from throughout the Colorado River Basin took the stage at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference earlier this month to talk about conserving water in the face of the twin threats to the river: increasing demand and climate change.
Federal water managers are starting to review a crucial 2007 agreement for seven Western states to share drought-diminished water supplies from the Colorado River ahead of talks about revising and renewing it beginning in 2026, U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said Friday.
Bernhardt called for a report next December, ahead of a deadline set in the older deal, which established a schedule of strict water cutbacks to states if levels keep falling at the key Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs.
We haven’t published many ten-part editorials in the Daily Post over the past 15 years. But we also don’t come across many political issues — local, state, or national — as complicated or as perplexing as the declining lake levels in the two largest reservoirs situated on the Colorado River: Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
An invasive mussel that has taken up residence in Lake Powell on the Colorado River is threatening Utah’s push to develop a $1.8 billion pipeline to deliver water to fast-growing areas. The Army Corps of Engineers has asked the state to provide a plan on how it will prevent the pipeline from transporting quagga mussels from the lake on the Arizona-Utah border, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Friday. The 140-mile (225-kilometer) pipeline aims to transport water to Washington and Kane counties in southern Utah. The line is planned to end at Sand Hollow Reservoir near St. George.
Colorado’s western slope water managers have doubled down on their position that they will oppose federal legislation creating a new regulated pool of water to boost the falling level of Lake Powell unless Colorado adopts a policy that the pool should be filled only on a voluntary basis. At a well-attended water meeting last week, Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said that without a new state policy putting limits on how water can be stored in the big reservoir, “You will find that our district, the Southwest District and hopefully others will be, frankly, opposing the federal legislation.”
Nearly a decade ago, Gabriel Lozada, a man with a wiry frame and waves of steel-gray hair who looks exactly like the mathematician he is, set out to answer what he thought was a relatively simple question: Could Utah’s proposed Lake Powell Pipeline — a plan to ferry Colorado River water to southern Utah — live up to the state’s rosy forecasts of growth and prosperity? Or was it more likely to tank the economy of a small but lively retirement community in the southwestern Utah desert?
Like rust slowly consuming the body of a car, drought has spread upstream on the Colorado River. The river’s Upper Basin – generally north of Lake Powell – has been largely insulated from the 19-year drought afflicting the giant watershed, thanks to the region’s relatively small water demand and heavy snows that bury Colorado’s 14,000ft peaks each winter. But this year, there was no salvation in the snowpack. Several major Colorado River tributaries – the Dolores, San Juan and Gunnison rivers – saw record-low snowpack this winter.
