Thursday Top of the Scroll: Arizona’s lifeline to the Colorado River is drying up. Were warnings from history ignored?
The Phoenix area as we know it today wouldn’t exist without a massive, gravity-defying canal that cuts through the desert. For decades, the metro has grown on the back of an unusual water supply. The Central Arizona Project is a canal system that pulls water from the Colorado River on the state’s western border, then carries it more than 300 miles, uphill through a series of pipes and pumps to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Today, water shortages threaten that improbable system, and a series of warnings about the canal’s future from the 1960s, largely ignored for decades, seem prescient. … The architects of the CAP, 1960s policymakers who championed it as a promising part of Arizona’s future, were clear about the fact that it would not work forever without extra help. They publicly forecasted big drops to its flows in the 21st century and laid out a plan to avoid them. … Now, decades later, we know those suggestions never became reality.
Other Colorado River management news:
