As Colorado River shrinks, pain of drought to spread
Rolf Schmidt-Petersen knows what can happen when a water shortage hits: Reservoirs shrink and tempers flare. “We had people literally throwing rocks, tomatoes when Elephant Butte went down,” recalled Schmidt-Petersen, director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission. He was talking about a 2003 deal to release water from a reservoir in southern New Mexico and drop the lake by about 33 feet to assist farmers in the state and neighboring Texas. … Decades later, the 2.2-million-acre-foot reservoir, part of the Rio Grande Basin, contains only about 260,000 acre-feet of water, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
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