Opinion: Lake Mead’s water problem, summed up in a single chart
Lake Mead relies on inflow – mostly, water released from the upstream Lake Powell. Until recently, Lake Mead typically would get at least 8.23 million acre-feet of water annually from Lake Powell – enough to cover the state of Maryland in more than a foot of water. We began this year expecting to get a lower 7.48 million acre-feet release from Lake Powell. But the federal Bureau of Reclamation, for the first time, trimmed that mid-year to 7 million acre-feet because of how dangerously close Powell was to something called “minimum power pool.”
-Written by Arizona Republic columnist Joanna Allhands.