Opinion: California wants to keep (most) of the Colorado River for itself
If the Colorado River continues to dwindle from the same arid trend of the last two decades, it could take as little as two bad drought years to drive the reservoir here on the Arizona-Nevada border to “dead pool.” That’s the term for levels so low that water can barely flow out of Hoover Dam. Mead is already just 29 percent full, its lowest level since it began filling in the 1930s. But dead pool would be a true disaster for farms, towns and cities from San Diego to Denver that depend on water from Mead and other reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin. Lake Powell, upstream on the Arizona-Utah border, is 23 percent full, the lowest since it filled in the 1960s.
-Written by John Fleck, co-author of “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.”Related articles:
