Serving as the “lifeline of the
Southwest,” and one of the most heavily regulated rivers in the
world, the Colorado River provides water to 35 million people and
more than 4 million acres of farmland in a region encompassing
some 246,000 square miles.
From its headwaters northwest of Denver in the Rocky Mountains,
the 1,450-mile long river and its tributaries pass through parts
of seven states: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico,
Nevada, Utah and Wyoming and is also used by the
Republic of Mexico. Along the way, almost every drop of the
Colorado River is allocated for use.
The Colorado River Basin is also home to a range of habitats and
ecosystems from mountain to desert to ocean.
Concerning news about Utah’s extreme drought keeps coming. On
Wednesday, Utah’s Department of Natural Resources said the
drought continues to have “a stranglehold on the state,”
despite wild weather swings that dumped rain in some areas.
Washington Post Columnist David Von Drehle recently wrote an
opinion piece about the drought gripping the West. He spoke
with KUER’s Pamela McCall about the situation.
In late June, Simon Martinez drove along one of the dirt roads
crisscrossing the parched rocky shrubland on the Ute Mountain
Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch Enterprise, a 7,700-acre agricultural
operation owned by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in the far
southwestern corner of Colorado. In normal times, he would be
driving past giant circular fields of corn and alfalfa
irrigated by 110 rotating sprinklers called pivots. But most of
the fields are barren this year, casualties of an unprecedented
drought — “the worst in 30 years,” said Martinez …
The water levels of two major water bodies — including a major
reservoir — have reached historic lows in recent days amid
extreme drought conditions in the western United States. Water
levels at Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the
country, reached a record low — below 3,555.10 feet, the
previous record low, reached in April 2005. As of Monday, the
elevation at the reservoir straddling the border between
Arizona and Utah was at 3,554.51 feet, according to data
tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
In the state that perfected if not invented the American
summer, the smell of 17 million gallons of spilled sewage
lingered last week on a Southern California beach. There were
bare rocks where snow once capped the Sierra Nevada and bathtub
rings where water once glistened in Shasta Lake. Wildfires
roared across the West, threatening the electrical grid, the
smoke so thick it could be seen from space, pluming into the
jet stream, delaying planes in Denver, turning the sun red in
Manhattan, creating its own weather.
Today, in Episode 3 of Drought Week, we take a journey through
the American Southwest to Las Vegas, down to Arizona’s Sonoran
Desert and through California’s Mojave Desert. We speak to a
social scientist, a folklorist and a politician about their
efforts to understand the plants and animals affected by this
historic drought. We’ll focus on three iconic plants: Joshua
trees. Saguaro cactuses. And, well, lawn grass.
A bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate aims to provide
billions of dollars to improve access to clean water in tribal
lands. One of the senators who introduced the bill, Sen.
Michael Bennet, D-Colo., wrote in the foreword of a report
about tribal water access within the Colorado River Basin that
one estimate states 48% of households within tribal lands lack
clean water or sufficient sanitation.
The water level in Lake Powell has dropped to the lowest level
since the U.S. government started filling the enormous
reservoir on the Colorado River in the 1960s — another sign of
the ravages of the Western drought. … The water
level has plunged as the American West experiences what
scientists are calling a “megadrought.” Too little water
is coming into the lake, and too much is being sent downriver
to maintain levels in Lake Mead, which is also
at historically low levels.
Creeks, rivers and lakes that are fed by melting snow across
the U.S. West are already running low as of mid-July 2021, much
to the worry of farmers, biologists and snow hydrologists like
me. This is not surprising in California, where snow levels
over the previous winter were well below normal. But it is also
true across Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, which in general
received a normal amount of snow. You’d think if there was
normal amount of snow you’d have plenty of water downstream,
right? … But another less studied way moisture can be lost is
by evaporating straight into the atmosphere.
With water levels falling rapidly at Lake Powell on the
Arizona-Utah border, federal officials are taking what could be
the first of several steps to prop it up. This month the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation started a six-month effort to raise the
lake around 3 feet by the end of 2021 by releasing 181,000 acre
feet of water from three upstream reservoirs. It comes as the
lake just Sunday fell below its lowest level on record.
American culture is reckoning with some of the negative impacts
of our history. … In the past few weeks alone, St. Paul,
Nashville, and St. Louis governments and activists are having
substantive policy discussions about making reparations –
including direct payouts of money – to African Americans, to
atone for the historic sin of slavery. Reparations
discussions also have included making necessary amends to
indigenous people. … The concept of “ecological
reparations” takes the conversation another step forward.
– Written by Gary Wockner, who lives in Colorado and
is active in river protection around the world.
When the current drought began in 2000, the three Lower Basin
states that take water from the lake (Arizona, California
and Nevada) suddenly awakened to the problem. After several
years of difficult negotiations, they agreed on a Drought
Contingency Plan (DCP) that, with previously agreed cuts,
would bring the lake into balance. Hoping the drought
would lift before too long, the DCP negotiators agreed to
spread the cuts over coming years in response to changing lake
levels. However, as the drought continues and intensifies, the
Drought Contingency Plan is looking more like a Drought
Certainty Plan. -Written by former Secretary of the Interior Bruce
Babbitt.
Monsoon season in the Southwestern United States is providing
relief to parts of the region that are desperate for any kind
of precipitation, but life-threatening flash floods and
lightning are also part of the deal. On Thursday night, a
downpour in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Ariz., brought heavy rain,
lightning and National Weather Service cellphone alerts of “a
dangerous and life-threatening situation.” … [T]his year
has already seen a dramatic difference — a 200 percent increase
in precipitation over the last two months in parts of the
Southwest.
On the side of a dirt road in Gunnison County, a herd of cattle
is cooling off in the water of an irrigation ditch. Doug
Washburn, range manager for Spann Ranches in southwestern
Colorado, points at the hills surrounding the operation’s
northern headquarters. … Colorado’s Western Slope
is considered a climate hot spot where temperatures
are increasing faster than the global average. This warming has
contributed to more than 20 years of dryness,
which scientists are calling a megadrought.
Lake Powell will soon hit its lowest level since Glen Canyon
Dam started trapping the Colorado River’s water in 1963 — even
with emergency releases of water from reservoirs upstream. The
Bureau of Reclamation announced Thursday that the lake
elevation will soon drop below 3,555.1 feet above sea level,
the record set in 2005, back near the start of a 20-year dry
cycle plaguing the Colorado River Basin….The increasingly
dire situations at Lake Powell and its downstream partner Lake
Mead illustrate the stress on the Colorado River system….
Confronting the historic drought that has a firm grip on the
American West requires a heavy federal infrastructure
investment to protect existing water supplies but also will
depend on efforts at all levels of government to reduce demand
by promoting water efficiency and recycling, Interior Secretary
Deb Haaland said Thursday.
Southern Arizona has been under the strongest category of
drought since early last year. With a strong start to monsoon,
the area should soon show a bit of recovery. It takes more than
just a handful of good rainfalls to recover from such a bad
drought. … The drought is one of the reasons why Pima County
has had so many flash flood warnings this year. Soil that has
not seen rain in a while is not as absorbent as regular soil,
so heavy rainfalls over dry ground lead to flash flooding more
often. This also causes problems on the roads.
The Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, will visit Denver
to address the worsening drought and wildfire
conditions. The biggest area of concern is the deep
drought on the western slope. Haaland will be in Grand
Junction Friday talking about wildland fire preparedness and
response. On Saturday, Haaland will be in Ridgeway discussing
Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced the selection
of Michael Norris as the Area Manager of its Lower
Colorado Basin Region Yuma Area Office. He has served as the
Deputy Area Manager for seven years. In his new capacity,
Norris is responsible for delivery of Colorado River water to
the Yuma area and Mexico, groundwater and salinity management,
resource management, engineering and construction.
A new report issued today by seven environmental non-profit
organizations examines ten strategies to bolster climate
resilience and mitigate the impact of climate change in the
Colorado River Basin, which is currently grappling with a
historic megadrought. A crucial source of water for over 40
million people, the Colorado River is facing severe declines in
stream flows and a looming federal shortage declaration as a
result of a decades-long drought and increasing temperatures.
The mountain spring that pioneers used to water their hayfields
and now fills people’s taps flowed reliably into the old cowboy
town of Oakley for decades. So when it dwindled to a trickle in
this year’s scorching drought, officials took drastic action to
preserve their water: They stopped building. During the
coronavirus pandemic, the real estate market in their
1,750-person city boomed as remote workers flocked in from the
West Coast and second homeowners staked weekend ranches. But
those newcomers need water — water that is vanishing as a
megadrought dries up reservoirs and rivers across the
West.
Through her new documentary, “Where There Once Was Water,”
Brittany App introduces innovative ways to conserve water,
restore ecosystems, and reconsider our relationship with the
natural world. The film follows her venturing through
California and the Southwest in search of people practicing
wise water management.
A historic drought has desiccated much of the American West,
bringing reservoir levels to record lows and stoking fears of
catastrophic wildfires across the region. We spoke with two
members of the Water Policy Center research network and experts
on the Colorado River: Dr. Bonnie Colby of the University of
Arizona (she’s also a member of the Colorado River Research
Group) and John Fleck of the University of New Mexico. Prepare
to be surprised: we encountered some delightful optimism in
this wide-ranging conversation.
As the West descends deeper into drought, climate and water
experts are growing increasingly alarmed by California’s
severely shriveling reservoirs. On Monday, Shasta Lake — the
largest reservoir in the state — held a scant 1.57 million
acre-feet of water, according to the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, or about 35% of its capacity. A series of
satellite images captured by NASA show just how dramatically
the water level has fallen.
Rick Daniels lies awake at night worrying about a rusty
contraption in a forlorn field, littered with discarded pipes
and fire hydrants. It is the only water pump in Needles that
meets state water quality standards, running 23 hours a day to
keep up with demand, according to Daniels, the city manager.
That’s a thin margin in one of America’s hottest cities, an
urban speck in the desert near California’s border with
Arizona. If this lone pump fails, 5,000 residents face the
ultimate risk of taps running dry, as temperatures soar past
120 degrees …
At least 70 large wildfires are burning across the US west and
nearby states – engulfing more than 1m acres in flames – as
fears mount that shifting conditions can worsen an already dire
situation. Significant areas of these states are in the grips
of drought conditions that are considered “extreme” and
“exceptional” – the most severe categories. In California,
a rapidly growing wildfire south of Lake Tahoe jumped a
highway, prompting more evacuation orders and the cancellation
of an extreme bike ride through the Sierra Nevada on Saturday.
The growing crisis on the Colorado River came into sharper
focus last week when the Bureau of Reclamation began emergency
releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to shore up
Lake Powell’s declining levels, now at historic lows. The
move will bolster Powell’s level by 3 feet in hopes of
preventing it from dropping to a point where Glen Canyon Dam
would not be able to generate electrical power, according to
the agency’s Upper Colorado regional director Wayne Pullan.
While the historic June 15 low for Lake Mead has drawn
headlines – “its lowest level on record since the reservoir was
filled in the 1930” – we’re about to hit a similar milestone
upstream at Lake Powell that has received less attention, but
may in fact be more important. It was co-author Eric Kuhn who
drew this to my attention – I hadn’t noticed. He notes that
sometime around July 24 give or take our eyeballing of the
Colorado Basin River Forecasting Center graph, Powell will
cross elevation 3,555 feet above sea level. That was the
previous post-filling low, on April 8, 2005.
Whether you’re a kayaker or an angler or a hard-core gardener
in Colorado, we get that this water thing is
confusing. … The drought and the overarching
impacts of climate change have already generated multiple
stories in 2021 and will be a big part of news coverage from
here on out. We get reader questions along the way about the
severity of the drought and what it means for Colorado
residents — here are a few of those questions, and some answers
from some key experts.
Emergency water releases from reservoirs upstream of Lake
Powell are underway to preserve the nation’s second-largest
reservoir’s ability to generate hydroelectric power. The Bureau
of Reclamation started releasing additional water Thursday from
Flaming Gorge reservoir in Wyoming. Additional water releases
from Blue Mesa reservoir in Colorado and Navajo reservoir in
New Mexico are planned to commence later this year. Emergency
releases could last until at least December, and could extend
into 2022. Lake Powell is projected to hit a record low in
July. It’s situated on the Colorado River, a drinking and
irrigation water source for more than 40 million people in the
Southwest.
The North American monsoon has returned to Colorado, and the
rain has brought some much-needed relief to some of the driest
parts of the state — after multiple back-to-back years of
almost no summer rain. … Gov. Jared Polis has recently
declared a drought emergency for the region and the rest of
western Colorado. … The seasonal moisture from the
tropics creates afternoon cloud cover that protects …
drought-stricken creeks from baking in the sun. The rain helps
lower the risk for wildfires. The timing of the monsoon is
vital to Colorado’s ecosystem, which evolved on its schedule.
A study from UNLV shows some interesting results about how much
water people used during Governor Steve Sisolak’s stay at home
order in March 2020. Researchers at UNLV wanted to know the
impact staying at home had on water use. Researchers looked at
water bills from Henderson before the stay at home order and
several months after the order was in place. The study found
usage at home soared, outpacing pre-pandemic usage at homes,
businesses and schools.
Colorado’s high altitude hay meadows, a significant water user
in the state, could be re-operated to yield more than 40
percent in water savings, according to a new report. The report
is based on a major high tech research initiative to see if
ranch-scale water conservation techniques, in which farmers are
paid to voluntarily stop irrigating their fields temporarily,
could produce enough saved water to help protect the Colorado
River from unplanned shortages due to drought and climate
change.
The water levels behind the Colorado River’s biggest dams are
fast-approaching or already at record lows. The historic
21-year megadrought that is squeezing some Western states’
water supplies will also likely start showing up in energy
bills, because those dams can’t produce as much electricity.
The problem is most acute at the Upper Colorado River basin’s
largest reservoir: Lake Powell.
Standing at the edge of a precipice, under a scorching sun in
eastern Utah, you can see nothing but the state’s infamous red
rocks and towering buttes for miles. … But if you happen to
glance down at the dizzying depths of the canyon that lies at
the bottom of the desert sandstone mountains, you’d see a lush
oasis, blooming with green vegetation, the Price River snaking
through the rock even on the hottest of summer days. And if you
scrambled down, and watched patiently for long enough, you
might even spot some beavers – the very architects of this
thriving wetland landscape, smack bang in the middle of the
desert.
Drying juniper berries litter the ground as Rusine Stanley
plunges a water hose into empty tanks in her backyard. As
bubbles begin to gurgle, each tank fills to the brim. …
Brittle branches break at the touch as Stanley runs her hand
through a juniper tree on her 10-acre property. Its
needle-like leaves are yellowing, each more than the last. This
backyard is a microcosm for a phenomenon that
silviculturists and researchers are tracking
across northern and central Arizona, where the
Southwest’s relentless drought is killing juniper
trees across thousands of acres.
The punishing heat wave continues in much of the West. However,
for some in places in the Southwest including Arizona, the
long-awaited monsoon will bring milder temperatures and
rainfall. It may just arrive a little bit too fast, raising
flash flooding concerns in the area. … Rainfall amounts of
anywhere from a half inch to 1 inch are possible, said the
National Weather Service in Phoenix. Upper-end amounts of 2 to
4 inches aren’t out of the question.
As concerns flare over record-low water levels at Lake Mead, a
new UNLV study shows that COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home orders
— and a subsequent societal shift to remote work — may be
exacerbating the problem. The study, recently published in the
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that
Las Vegas Valley residential water use soared during the
pandemic, outpacing even combined pre-pandemic usage across
Southern Nevada’s three main property types (residential,
commercial, and schools).
The Colorado River makes an impressive 1,400-mile journey from
Colorado, all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. It starts as
snowpack in Rocky Mountain National Park in Northern Colorado
and makes its way westward to Utah. The Utah portion of the
river course starts on the Colorado Plateau before heading to
Moab, where the water sweeps by Arches and Canyonlands national
parks – both amazing landscapes eroded into canyons and mesas
by the Colorado and Green rivers.
With the west in extreme drought, Lake Mead, fed by the
Colorado River and formed by the Hoover Dam, reached historic
lows in June. The water level continues to fall, continuing a
trend that began more than 20 years ago. The Federal government
is expected to declare a water shortage in the lower basin of
the Colorado River by 2022 at the latest, which will trigger
mandatory water cuts in Arizona and Nevada. These cuts will
particularly impact farmers. But they are likely to hit
indigenous communities particularly hard …
Caddisfly swarms along the Colorado River in Laughlin are
annoying most residents, but scientists see them as an
opportunity. Dr. Michael Cavallaro, entomologist and pest
abatement manager for Bullhead City, is working on a project to
find a permanent solution to the swarms, which have become a
nuisance for residents and businesses. He thinks the residents
should feel honored, since caddisflies swarm only in healthy
ecosystems with high-quality, clean water.
[S]ince 2000, scientists say the river’s flow has dwindled
by 20% compared to the previous century’s average. This year is
the second driest on record, with the flow into Lake Mead just
a quarter of what would be considered normal. … In June,
the level of Lake Mead plunged below 1,075ft, a point that will
trigger, for the first time, federally mandated cuts in water
allocations next year. The Bureau of Reclamation expects this
historic low to spiral further …
For the past few weeks, the American West has been confronting
a hellish climate nightmare of scorching heat waves, a severe
drought, and raging wildfires. And it’s not just the
West—or even the United States. In
typically chilly Siberia, ground temperatures reached
a blistering 118 degrees Fahrenheit. The Middle
East has been gripped by a searing heat wave and a drought
that has especially hammered Syria. In late June, a
small Canadian village was almost completely consumed
by wildfire. China is also bracing for another year
of extreme weather…
In the gray light of dawn, hundreds of swallows darted over a
pool of standing water in an irrigated field along the Colorado
River. The birds were attracted to the early-morning mosquitos
swarming the saturated landscape. … Across the Western
Slope, birds and other wildlife have come to depend on these
artificially created wetlands, a result of flood irrigation.
But as the state of Colorado grapples with whether to implement
a demand-management program, which would pay irrigators to
temporarily dry up fields in an effort to send more water
downstream, there could be unintended consequences for the
animals that use irrigated agriculture for their habitat.
Development of a sprawling, politically charged Arizona housing
development has been stopped, with the Fish and Wildlife
Service’s newly revealed rescinding of a Trump administration
decision. The agency’s about-face caused the Army Corps of
Engineers to suspend its dredge-and-fill permit for the
28,000-home The Villages at Vigneto project, according to court
documents. … The 2017 document “concurred that the Corps
of Engineers’ granting of a Clean Water Act section 404 permit
for the Villages at Vigneto Development was not likely to
adversely affect threatened and endangered species or their
critical habitat.”
[A]fter years of an unrelenting drought that has quickly
accelerated amid record temperatures and lower snowpack melt,
[Lake Mead] is set to mark another, more dire turning
point. Next month, the federal government expects to declare
its first-ever shortage on the lake, triggering cuts
to water delivered to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico on Jan.
1. If the lake, currently at 1,068 feet, drops 28 more
feet by next year, the spigot of water to California will start
to tighten in 2023.
The confluence of the tiny San Pedro River and the much larger
Gila was once one of the richest locales in one of the most
productive river ecosystems in the American Southwest, an
incomparable oasis of biodiversity. The rivers frequently
flooded their banks, a life-giving pulse … The
confluence now is a very different place, its richness long
diminished. A massive mountain of orange- and dun-colored
smelter tailings, left from the days of copper and lead
processing and riddled with arsenic, towers where the two
rivers meet. Water rarely flows there, with an occasional
summer downpour delivering an ephemeral trickle.
The Colorado River is tapped out. Another dry year has left the
waterway that supplies 40 million people in the Southwest
parched. A prolonged 21-year warming and drying trend is
pushing the nation’s two largest reservoirs to record lows. For
the first time this summer, the federal government will declare
a shortage. Climate change is exacerbating the current drought.
Warming temperatures are upending how the water cycle functions
in the Southwest. The 1,450-mile long river acts as a drinking
water supply, a hydroelectric power generator, and an irrigator
of crop fields across seven Western states and two in Mexico.
With a federal water shortage declaration looming for the
Southwest, Denver Water is trying to help. Normally nearly 20%
of the city’s water comes from Grand County, which is filled
with streams that make up the headwaters of the Colorado River.
In a normal year, 60% of the water in Grand County is diverted
from streams high above Grand Lake and captured near Winter
Park and sent to the other side of the Continental Divide for
agricultural and municipal water supply, mostly on the Front
Range.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it plans to
propose reclassifying a rare Colorado River Basin fish called
the razorback sucker from endangered to threatened status after
a multiyear and multistate effort throughout the Southwestern
U.S. to replenish its populations. A proposed formal relisting,
to be published Wednesday in the Federal Register, would
classify the fish as no longer on the brink of extinction. But
it would require continued management of the razorback’s
survival in the Colorado River and several key tributaries. The
Fish and Wildlife Service first said it would recommend the
change in 2018.
The Bureau of Reclamation Tuesday announced the selection of
Tonya Hart as the Regional Engineer of the Lower Colorado Basin
Region. In this capacity, she oversees and provides direction
for the Region’s engineering activities in Arizona, Southern
Nevada and Southern California. Additionally, she oversees the
operations and maintenance of Reclamation’s Boulder City
campus. Hart most recently served as a Supervisory Civil
Engineer in the Geotechnical Services Division of Reclamation’s
Technical Service Center (TSC) located in Denver,
Colorado.
The Bureau of Reclamation urges those recreating on or along
the Colorado River through Glen and Grand canyons to exercise
increased caution as summer energy demands may cause rapid
changes to the river’s flow. Unscheduled fluctuations in water
releases may occur without notice. Vessels should be secured to
withstand potential changes in water levels and campers should
avoid setting camp where a sudden river rise could reach tents
or other camping supplies.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to
downgrade a Colorado River fish, the razorback sucker, from
“endangered” to “threatened.” The razorback sucker was listed
as endangered in 1991 due to habitat loss and predation by
introduced exotic species. Wildlife officials say the
population has recovered to tens of thousands of fish in the
Green, San Juan, and Colorado rivers, meeting the criteria for
downlisting. However, the Fish and Wildlife Service
acknowledges many razorback suckers born in the wild do not
reach adulthood.
Lake Mead, which provides water for 25 million people in
the American West, has shrunk to 36 percent of its capacity.
One rural California community has run out of water entirely
after its well broke in early June. Fields are sitting fallow,
as farmers sell their water allotments instead of growing
crops, putting the nation’s food supply in peril. As the West
withers under extreme drought, legislators in the US House of
Representatives have introduced HR 4099, a bill that would
direct the Secretary of the Interior to create a program to
fund $750 million worth of water recycling projects in the 17
western states through the year 2027.
The expected water cuts from the Colorado River as a result of
the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) will likely mean higher
water utility rates, according to Fitch Ratings. The U.S.
Congress passed the DCP in 2019 to protect water levels in Lake
Powell and Lake Mead which provide water to Colorado River
basin states. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New
Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and Mexico entered into the DCP,
which mandates how water cuts will occur when the lakes drop to
certain levels, called tiers.
A pair of governors on Sunday called on the federal government
for help and pushed for solutions as their states grapple with
recording-breaking temperatures, drought and wildfires that
officials have said is being driven by climate change.
… The bipartisan plea follows a meeting last
week between President Joe Biden and other Western governors
during which he announced new federal response plans to help
address the wildfire threats and extreme heat being driven by
climate change. They include extending seasonal hiring, adding
“surge capacity” by training and equipping additional
personnel, and adding fire detection resources.
Massive buildings are sprouting from our desert landscapes,
their footprints normally more than a million square feet. The
structures are filled with computer servers processing and
storing huge amounts of data. … Duff is the only city
council member to vote no on a recently approved $800 million
data center – rumored to be for Facebook – after discovering
the facility would eventually use 1.75 million gallons of water
every day for cooling their rows of servers once fully
operational. This as state reservoirs like Lake Mead and rivers
like the Colorado are so low that federal restrictions are
likely to be triggered on Arizona’s water allocation as early
as next year.
The United States and Mexico are tussling over their dwindling
shared water supplies after years of unprecedented heat and
insufficient rainfall. Sustained drought on the middle-lower
Rio Grande since the mid-1990s means less Mexican water flows
to the U.S. The Colorado River Basin, which supplies seven U.S.
states and two Mexican states, is also at record low levels. A
1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs water relations
between the two neighbors.
In Sept. 2020, the 7-year-old female mountain lion pictured
above was dehydrated and burnt on the bottom of her paw pads.
The pain made it unbearable to walk. According to data
from a satellite tracking collar and camera footage, seven
months later she is chasing deer, mating, and has even
travelled hundreds of miles through the San Gabriel Mountain
wilderness in southern California, on those once lifeless feet.
… She was found at the edge of a Monrovia resident’s
backyard pond, where she crawled in search of water during the
Bobcat Fire …
For thousands of years, an Arizona tribe relied on the Colorado
River’s natural flooding patterns to farm….Now, gravity sends
the river water from the north end of the Colorado River Indian
Tribes reservation through 19th century canals to sustain
alfalfa, cotton, wheat, onions and potatoes, mainly by flooding
the fields. Some of those fields haven’t been producing lately
as the tribe contributes water to prop up Lake Mead to help
weather a historic drought in the American West…. As
Arizona faces mandatory cuts next year in its Colorado River
supply, the tribes see themselves as major players in the
future of water.
Gov. Jared Polis formally declared a drought emergency Friday
for almost two dozen western Colorado counties. Colorado’s
Drought Task Force, Agriculture Impact Task Force and Municipal
Water Task Force will remain active and responsive to local
needs, a release from the Colorado Water Conservation Board
states Friday.
Skiers and snowboarders pray for snow so they can shred the
slopes. Climatologists and hydrologists have an entirely
different and more critical reason to cross their fingers for
the “white gold.” The West’s historic drought has many impacts,
including water shortages, more severe wildfire seasons and
unprecedented heat waves, to name a few. Intense droughts are a
result of many factors, one of which scientists have recently
begun to analyze with more scrutiny: snow drought.
You’d think that spending $200 million to help shore up
our shrinking water supply would be a monumentally good thing.
And it could have been, if there weren’t so many stipulations
on how that cash must be spent. Lawmakers plopped $160
million into a newly created drought mitigation fund – a hefty
chunk of change that some have called “unprecedented.”
They set up the fund, according to the budget bill,
because “many regions in this state lack access to
sustainable water supplies to meet their long-term water
demands and need financial assistance to develop water supply
and conservation projects.” -Written by Arizona Republic columnist Joanna
Allhands.
As a warming climate reduces the river’s flow, [Utah State
University scientist Jack] Schmidt, 70, is making what could be
his most important push to shape the fate of his beloved
waterway. He and his colleagues are working to inject a dose of
scientific reality into public debate over water resources
that, the team says, is too often clouded by wishful or
outdated thinking. The biggest delusion: that there will be
enough water in a drier future to satisfy all the demands from
cities, farmers, power producers, and others, while still
protecting sensitive ecosystems and endangered species.
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A project to generate electricity in the Little Colorado River
Basin may have stalled. Conservation groups were concerned
when a Phoenix-based company proposed building dams on the
Navajo Nation to generate electricity. Their concerns grew last
year, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a
preliminary permit for feasibility studies. But the
company has missed deadlines that would move the project
forward. … The company has also failed to receive
approval for the project from the Navajo Nation, which would be
a critical step in the process.
With a record-shattering heat wave suffocating much of the
Pacific Northwest and a drought-fueled wildfire season already
well underway in New Mexico, Arizona and California, President
Biden will attend a virtual meeting with leaders of Western
states on Wednesday to discuss strategies to minimize
weather-related disasters this summer. Jen Psaki, the White
House press secretary, told reporters that the president
planned to bring together members of his cabinet and the
Western governors to assess “the devastating intersection of
drought, heat, and wildfires,” as well as “prevention,
preparedness, and response efforts for this wildfire season.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday unanimously declined a
petition by Imperial Valley farmer Michael Abatti claiming he
and a handful of other agricultural landowners, not the
Imperial Irrigation District, held senior rights to Colorado
River water that nearly 40 million people across the West
depend on. The decision likely is the last stop for a
torturous legal battle that dates back to 2013. As the law
stands, farmers have a guaranteed right to water delivery but
not a special claim above other users like homes and geothermal
plants.
Fueled by overzealous fire suppression, drier summers, rising
temperatures and a relentless drought, wildfires across Arizona
and the Southwest have been sparking more frequently,
burning at greater severity and scorching more
land. … This ongoing fire regime, which has intensified
in the last three decades, is transforming the
state’s once-dense forests. The long-term effect of these
wildfires on plant regrowth, wildlife habitat, watershed health
and forest fuels are at the forefront of many ongoing studies.
Much of the Western half of the United States is in the grip of
a severe drought of historic proportions. Conditions are
especially bad in California and the Southwest, but the drought
extends into the Pacific Northwest, much of the Intermountain
West, and even the Northern Plains. Drought emergencies have
been declared. Farmers and ranchers are suffering. States are
facing water cutbacks. Large wildfires burned earlier than
usual with more major fires burning in Arizona, New Mexico and
other states. There appears to be little relief in sight.
Las Vegas, known for its searing summertime heat and glitzy
casino fountains, is projected to get even hotter in the coming
years as climate change intensifies. As temperatures rise,
possibly as much as 10 degrees by end of the century, according
to some models, water demand for the desert community is
expected to spike. That is not good news in a fast-growing
region that depends largely on a limited supply of water from
an already drought-stressed Colorado River.
Once again, the chest beating for
a sea-to-sea pipeline to “fix” the Salton
Sea has begun. Here are a few facts are often
ignored. The Coachella Canal shows that it is
possible to transport water long distances without
pumping. That canal transports Colorado River water
122 miles to the Coachella Valley, all by gravity. It was
completed in 1948, before current environmental regulations.
According to the CVWD, this canal
delivers about 280,000 acre-feet per year of
water. -Written by Alexander Schriener Jr., a California
registered professional geologist who has lived in the
Coachella Valley for 33 years.
For the first time ever, an official Colorado River Tier 1
Shortage is expected to be declared starting January 1, 2022.
The announcement comes from the Bureau of Reclamation in August
based on projections for Lake Mead water levels for the
following January. The shortage declaration means reduced water
for some stakeholders who receive water from the Central
Arizona Project (CAP); those stakeholders who receive a portion
of their water from CAP include municipalities, agriculture,
tribes, and others.
Researchers from Oregon State University say ecological data
gathered during a recent low-flow experiment in the Grand
Canyon is a key step toward understanding Colorado River
ecosystems as the amount of water in the river continues to
decline. Dave Lytle, professor of integrative biology, and
Ph.D. students Angelika Kurthen and Jared Freedman teamed with
scientists from the United States Geological Survey during the
March 2021 project to examine the quantity and diversity of
invertebrates in the river.
Las Vegas, known for its searing summertime heat and glitzy casino fountains, is projected to get even hotter in the coming years as climate change intensifies. As temperatures rise, possibly as much as 10 degrees by end of the century, according to some models, water demand for the desert community is expected to spike. That is not good news in a fast-growing region that depends largely on a limited supply of water from an already drought-stressed Colorado River.
Climate change has plunged the Western U.S. into its worst
drought in two decades. And a record-breaking heat wave only
made things worse. In Arizona and Nevada, it’s been so hot that
doctors warned people they could get third-degree burns from
the asphalt. Wildfires raged in Montana and Utah. Power grids
in Texas strained as officials asked residents to limit
appliance use to avoid blackouts. The levels in Lake Mead,
which supplies water for millions of people, are at their
lowest since the 1930s.
Environmental Defense Fund, Business for Water Stewardship
and the National Audubon Society today announced that
corporations and foundations have committed the funding to
close an $8 million funding gap required to complete a landmark
water conservation project with the Colorado River Indian
Tribes (CRIT) and the state of Arizona.
Colorado River water managers could be pulled back to the
negotiating table as soon as next year to keep its biggest
reservoirs from declining further. The 2019 Drought Contingency
Plan was meant to give the U.S. and Mexican states that depend
on the river a roadmap to manage water shortages. That plan
requires the river’s biggest reservoir, Lake Mead, to drop to
unprecedented levels before conservation among all the lower
basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — becomes
mandatory. California isn’t required to conserve water in the
reservoir until it drops to an elevation of 1,045 feet above
sea level.
As the federal government prepares to declare a first-ever
water shortage at Lake Mead, Arizona state leaders, Native
American tribes, and philanthropic and corporate foundations
are stepping up to help conserve water. This week, these
entities committed to funding an $8 million gap to complete a
landmark water conservation project with the Colorado River
Indian Tribes and the state of Arizona.
Three conservation groups aiming to keep more water in rivers
for recreation are working on a revision to a state law.
American Whitewater, Conservation Colorado and Western Resource
Advocates are proposing an amendment to legislation that would
allow natural river features such as waves and rapids to get a
water right. Under the state’s current statute, in order to get
what is known as a recreational in-channel diversion water
right, it must be tied to a man-made structure in the river,
such as a design feature that creates the waves in many kayak
parks.
It might be tempting to shrug at the scorching weather across
large swaths of the West. This just in: It gets hot in the
summer. But this record-setting heat wave’s remarkable power,
size and unusually early appearance is giving meteorologists
and climate experts yet more cause for concern about the
routinization of extreme weather in an era of climate change.
These sprawling, persistent high-pressure zones popularly
called “heat domes” are relatively common in later summer
months. This current system is different.
Lake Powell’s water level is the lowest it’s been in decades,
and the latest 24-month projections from the Arizona and Utah
reservoir show that it’s likely to drop even further — below a
critical threshold of 3,525 feet by next
year. A 20-year megadrought and a hotter climate
has contributed to shrinking water supplies in the
Colorado River. If Lake Powell’s levels continue to dwindle, it
could set off litigation between the seven states and the 40
million people that all rely on the Colorado River.
Record-breaking heat and historic drought in the U.S. West are
doing little to discourage cities from planning to welcome
millions of new residents in the decades ahead. From Phoenix to
Boise, officials are preparing for a future both with more
people and less water, seeking to balance growth and
conservation. Development is constrained by the fact that 46%
of the 11-state Western region is federal land, managed by
agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management that are tasked with maintaining it for future
generations.
A new study led by researchers from McGill University and INRAE
found that between 51-60% of the 64 million kilometres of
rivers and streams on Earth that they investigated stop flowing
periodically, or run dry for part of the year. … The
research, which was published today in Nature, calls
for a paradigm shift in river science and management by
revising foundational concepts which traditionally assumed
year-round water flow in rivers and streams.
Summer has not officially started yet, but wildfire season has
already arrived in the US. Now an intense heat wave coupled
with extreme drought is threatening to make things worse. Large
wildfires have already burned 981,000 acres this year to date,
more than the 766,000 acres burned by the same time last year,
according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In Arizona,
more than 208,000 acres have burned, sending smoke into
Colorado.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced that Carly Jerla will lead
the Department of the Interior’s efforts, as a senior water
resources program manager, to develop updated operating
rules for Colorado River reservoirs. The Colorado River
sustains ecosystems and economies across the southwestern
United States and northwestern Mexico. A number of operating
rules and agreements within the United States and with the
Republic of Mexico expire at the end of 2025.
A heat dome is baking Arizona and Nevada, … At Lake Mead,
which supplies water for 25 million people in three
southwestern states and Mexico, water levels have plunged to
their lowest point since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s.
In California, farmers are abandoning their thirstiest crops to
save others, and communities are debating whether to ration tap
water….And it’s not even summer yet.
Los Angeles is a pretty hot and dry place, and in fact,
California is suffering from increasing impacts of drought, so
how does the water we use every day get here? Let’s take the
journey your water takes from the source to your mouth with
these 5 things to know:
In the same area of the mountains where the snow was 80
percent, river flows dripped out at 30 percent of their
average. … [T]here’s not much water when there’s this
level of aridity. Paddling, for me, is a benchmark, a tangible
way to understand what all those drought maps and numbers mean.
And these days, the bottom-scraping springtime runs feel like a
creepy indicator of how bad things will be downriver, where
those waterways are used to grow food, maintain ecosystems,
fight wildfires, and provide drinking water.
Some estimates suggest that [Horseshoe Lake] has already lost a
third of its capacity, with more sediment piling up each year
we don’t act. If the climate grows hotter and drier – but
punctuated by huge, short-lived floods – the last thing we need
is a reservoir that can no longer hold the water it once did.
We need every drop of storage we can get. -Written by Joanna Allhands, Arizona Republic
columnist.
As the Southwest prepares for what’s forecast to be another
mercilessly hot and dry summer, tensions over water scarcity
are rising like the mercury. Farmers are facing bleak growing
seasons and the possibility of farm failures in several areas
due to cutbacks in water allocations for irrigation, creating
friction between the ag community and cities on the dwindling
water supply in the region. Rural communities in Nevada and
elsewhere, already wary of incursions by urban areas into their
water supplies, are on high alert as the water crisis deepens.
Lucía Laguna carries her fate tattooed on her face — from the
corner of her mouth to her chin, black lines surf across her
coppery skin — the tribal art honoring her people will also
serve an important function later on. … But under the
merciless sun, Laguna, 51, worries about the fate of the river
and its impact on the Cucapá, her Indigenous people. A searing
drought is exacerbating the deadly heat in a region that long
ago saw its river flow diminished, after almost a century of
U.S. engineering projects, as well as a focus on water for
agriculture.
Lake Powell has drastically shriveled during 20 years of
drought, allowing dozens of miles of the Colorado River to
become a river again in world-famous Cataract Canyon. But why
have many of its legendary rapids failed to return? Three men
from Moab have made it their crusade to study that issue and to
document a stunning after-effect of Lake Powell: a river
struggling to cut its way through a monumental legacy of dried
mud.
The problem, as always, is that water keeps flowing from the
tap. Every other indicator is telling us we should be in red
alert right now about Arizona’s climate and water situation.
But when we turn the valve, even on these blazing days,
drinkable water flows. It’s a luxury in this season and this
place. And it makes it easy to turn away from the news. But we
shouldn’t. -Written by Tim Steller.
Managers of some Arizona golf courses are fighting a plan that
would cut water use at a time when the state is being
forced to confront shrinking water supplies. A group
representing golf courses has been pushing back against a
proposal by state officials that would reduce overall
water use on courses, instead offering a plan that would entail
less conservation. Opposition to the state’s proposal for
golf courses has emerged over the past several months, aired in
sometimes-tense virtual meetings …
The water [that Utah] plans to tap for the Lake Powell pipeline
was previously promised to the Ute Indian Tribe, which is now
suing to get back its water and asserting that the
misappropriation is one of a decades-long string of racially
motivated schemes to deprive it of its rights and property.
With a worsening drought gripping the West and wildfire season
looming, California is bracing for the most severe heat wave of
the year — one that promises to tax the state’s power supplies
while also offering a grim preview of challenging months to
come. The heat wave will bring triple-digit temperatures to the
valleys and inland regions of Southern California as well as
many parts of the rest of the state, heightening fire risks. It
comes as parts of Northern and Central California are turning
to water restrictions as the drought rapidly alters the
landscape.
Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72
percent of the region is in “severe” drought, 26 percent is in
exceptional drought, and populations are booming. Insufficient
monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter
left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical
amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer
season don’t show promise. … The past two decades have been
the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the
West, posing existential questions about how to secure a
livable future in the region.
Lake Mead has declined to its lowest level since the reservoir
was filled in the 1930s following the construction of Hoover
Dam, marking a new milestone for the water-starved Colorado
River in a downward spiral that shows no sign of letting up.
The reservoir near Las Vegas holds water for cities, farms and
tribal lands in Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico. Years
of unrelenting drought and temperatures pushed higher by
climate change are shrinking the flow into the lake,
contributing to the large mismatch between the demands for
water and the Colorado’s diminishing supply.
We’re moving later this summer to new quarters closer to the
Sacramento River, and we don’t want to haul all of our water
maps, Layperson’s Guides, DVDs and more to the new home. So
we’re making you a limited-time offer we hope you can’t refuse:
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The reservoir created by Hoover Dam, an engineering marvel that
symbolized the American ascendance of the 20th Century, has
sunk to its lowest level ever, underscoring the gravity of the
extreme drought across the U.S. West. Lake Mead, formed in the
1930s from the damming of the Colorado River at the
Nevada-Arizona border about 30 miles (50 km) east of Las Vegas,
is the largest reservoir in the United States. It is crucial to
the water supply of 25 million people including in the cities
of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas.
Adel Hagekhalil, a national water and infrastructure leader,
will take the helm of the nation’s largest drinking water
provider – the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California – following a vote Tuesday evening by the agency’s
board of directors. The 38-member board approved
Hagekhalil’s contract, making him the 14th general manager
in the district’s 93-year history.
A crippling drought in the western US is dropping the water
level at Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam to a historically low
level, putting pressure on the region’s drinking water supply
and the dam’s electric capacity. By Thursday, Lake Mead’s water
level is expected to sink to the lowest it’s been since it
began filling during construction of the Hoover Dam, according
to Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Patricia Aaron.
Water is like electricity. Most people don’t think about it
much until it’s gone. Now, as California and other Western
states find themselves heading into a severe and worsening
drought, a new interactive map is providing a breathtaking
journey that shows where America’s water comes from and ends
up. The project is called River Runner. It allows anyone to
click on any place where a raindrop would fall in the United
States, and then track its path through watersheds, into
creeks, rivers, lakes and ultimately the ocean.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has
hired Adel Hagekhalil as its next general manager, following a
bitter power struggle over the future of an agency that
delivers hundreds of billions of gallons each year from the
Colorado River and Northern California to a region that
otherwise wouldn’t have nearly enough water to support 19
million people.
In unburned forests, the spring runoff is a glorious, annual
event. But not this year. [U.S. Forest service ecologist Liz]
Roberts and other forest experts know that the runoff will
carry an array of frightening heavy metals and ash-laden
sediment generated in the burned soils, posing danger to the
people of Glenwood Springs, who rely on Grizzly Creek and its
neighbor just to the west, No Name Creek, for drinking
water.
A punishing drought is gripping much of the western U.S.
Scientists are calling it a “mega-drought” brought on by
climate change. It’s taking a dramatic toll on the Colorado
River system that provides water to 40 million people in seven
states. For more than eight decades, the Hoover Dam has relied
on water from Nevada’s Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But
now at age 85 it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of
the water the dam is supposed to be holding back is gone.
Storms from the Pacific set to swing into the rain-starved West
Coast this week may end up turning detrimental, AccuWeather
forecasters say, by whipping up gusty winds and heightening the
risk of lightning-induced wildfires. With over 87% of the
Western states in moderate to exceptional drought, the news of
Pacific storms poised to sweep onshore may sound good on the
surface. However, the pattern will be a double-edged sword.
Each storm is expected to arrive with “very limited moisture,”
according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex
Sosnowski.
In Sin City, one thing that will soon become unforgivable is
useless grass. A new Nevada law will outlaw about 40% of the
grass in the Las Vegas area in an effort to conserve water amid
a drought that is drying up the region’s primary water source:
the Colorado River. Other cities and states around the US have
enacted temporary bans on lawns that must be watered, but
legislation signed Friday by the state’s governor, Steve
Sisolak, makes Nevada the first in the nation to enact a
permanent ban on certain categories of grass.
The most important thing to understand: If you’re reading this,
you live in a desert. And you can live in this desert because
politicians, scientists and engineers have moved mountains,
almost literally, to bring you life-giving water. The latest
brawl in Water World plays out on this backdrop, and what comes
out of your tap may well depend on the result. Will it come
from recycled waste water? Desalination plants? A giant tunnel
or two under the Delta? The answers will, in large part, depend
on who’s chosen to lead the gargantuan Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California, which provides water to 19
million people from Ventura County to the Mexican border.
Drought is taking a dramatic toll on the Colorado River
system that provides water to 40 million people in seven states
– and may force the federal government to make a drastic and
historic decision. For more than eight decades, the
iconic Hoover Dam has relied on water from Nevada’s
Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at age 85, it
finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the dam
is supposed to be holding back is gone.
Why do Pinal County farmers keep growing alfalfa and cotton,
two relatively water-intensive crops, particularly when their
water supply is being so heavily cut? It’s a common
question. Most farmers know they need to grow more
drought-adapted crops as their Colorado River water evaporates
and growing seasons become even hotter and drier. But
farmers can’t plant lower water use crops that they can’t
sell. Any crop they grow needs a market. And there are
well-established markets for cotton and alfalfa – crops that
produce higher yields in central Arizona than in most other
places in the world. -Written by Joanna Allhands.
The WCWCD, along with the Utah Division of Water Resources, …
started making plans [in the 1990s] to import Colorado River
water from Lake Powell via a buried pipeline that would stretch
140 miles through rocky desert terrain, crossing some tribal
lands and sensitive habitats. The project has inched its way
forward over the decades since, finally advancing its
federally-required Environmental Impact Statement through the
public review process during the Trump administration, which
identified the pipeline as one of its infrastructure
priorities.
Lake Powell is within just a few feet of its low level ever
observed since it was first filled. Early season fires have
already torched over 400,000 acres in Colorado and California’s
reservoirs are 50 percent lower than they should be at this
time of year before summer has even officially begun. A year
after the skies over San Francisco glowed a hazy red as
wildfires choked the Bay Area, 2021 is shaping up to be the
year of real climate reckoning with drought in the western US
at historic levels.
The Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors adopted a
resolution Tuesday, June 1, to better serve IID’s
Coachella Valley energy customers and better protect Imperial
Valley’s water rights, according to a press release. The
Board’s resolution seeks to provide a local alternative to AB
1021 by Assemblyman Chad Mayes (I-Yucca Valley) that would
create a number of adverse consequences for the region, if
passed into law, including giving Coachella Valley energy
ratepayers a say over IID’s water rights and policy in Imperial
Valley.
A complex and arcane water banking program in the lower
Colorado River basin, adopted in 2007 and later amended, was
designed to incentivize water conservation, prevent waste, and
boost storage in a waning Lake Mead. The program has already
proved its worth, lifting Lake Mead dozens of feet higher than
it otherwise would have been…In the next two years, the
program will be tested in another way, becoming a small but
important source of water for Arizona and California even as
the lake continues to fall to levels that haven’t been
witnessed in several generations.
Arizona and other Western states just lived through the driest
year in more than a century, with no drought relief in sight in
the near future, experts told a House panel last week. The
period from April 2020 to March 2021 was the driest in the last
126 years for Arizona and other Western states, witnesses said.
It capped a two-decade stretch that was the driest in more than
100 years that records have been kept – and one of the driest
in the past 1,200 years based on paleohydrology evidence, one
official said.
Cynthia Beltran moved to Sunizona with her seven-year-old son
last autumn even though the area lacks functional drinking
water wells, because it was all she could afford. She cannot
afford the $15,000 cost of deepening her well, which dried
up last year, and had been paying for a local firm to deliver
water in a tanker. But at $100 a week it became too expensive,
so now she will be relying on a friend to help her fetch water
from her mother’s well. … Nearly 20 wells in Sunizona
alone were deepened between 2015 and 2019, after they dried
up.
Driving into Southern California’s Palo Verde Valley from the
Arizona border, fields of vibrant green appear out of the
desert like a mirage. Near the town of Blythe, water from the
Colorado River turns the dry earth into verdant farmland, much
of it to grow a single crop — alfalfa, a type of plant used
mainly to feed dairy cows. For decades, a significant portion
of alfalfa grown here and elsewhere in the western United
States — as much as 17 percent in 2017 — has been loaded onto
trucks, driven hundreds of miles to ports on the west coast,
and shipped around the world, mainly to China, Japan, and Saudi
Arabia.
With California’s rivers running low after two consecutive dry
winters, state officials and local water agencies have pumped
out a steady stream of drought declarations and calls for water
conservation in recent weeks. It’s clear the Golden State is in
a drought and it could escalate to a crisis, but, you may be
wondering, just how bad is it?
Nearly half of the country — from the Pacific coast to the
Great Plains and upper Midwest — is experiencing moderate to
exceptional drought conditions. That’s expected to get worse
throughout the summer. … UCLA climatologist Park Williams:
“This drought is far from over. 2021 is shaping up to
potentially be the driest of all of the drought years in the
last century, and definitely one of the driest of the last
millennium.”
As reality plays out, I continue to read how the drought in the
American West is causing levels in Lake’s Mead and Powell to
plummet. I also continue to see no action or accountability to
take bold action to resolve the issue as uncontrolled
development continues in the greater Phoenix and Las Vegas
areas. … There are 17 desalination plants operating in
California and the one in Carlsbad — the Claude Bud Lewis
Desalination Plant — is the largest in the U.S. -Written by R.B. Provencher, a former manager for the
U.S. Department of Energy and retired in Idaho Falls.
Between Las Vegas and Arizona, Lake Mead, the body of water
that is fed by the Colorado River, dropped below 1,075 feet on
Tuesday. The low water marks are signaling what could be the
first-ever water shortage on the Colorado River, CNN reports.
The lake’s levels show a continuing decline, according to the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), and any hope of recovery
won’t happen until at least the end of 2022.
Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the
Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the
Colorado River. … Since 2000, the water level in
the reservoir, which is the largest in the country, has dropped
about 140 feet. Lake Mead is now just 37% full, headed
for a first-ever official shortage and sinking
toward its lowest levels since it was filled.
Back in 1977, President Jimmy Carter wanted to put the Central
Arizona Project on a hit list of 17 water projects he found too
expensive and environmentally destructive. … [N]ow, as CAP’s
first water shortages draw near, a more subtle, long-term
threat to the Tucson area’s water future is emerging because of
climate change.
Every time I write about water, I get a similar email from
different folks. It argues that if we can build pipelines to
move oil, we should be able to capture and pipe enough
floodwater from the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Snake or
(insert your river here) to resolve shortages on the Colorado
River. I appreciate the big thinking. But I wish we could move
past this idea. Because we’ve studied this before, in multiple
iterations. Each solution has been projected to cost multiple
billions of dollars. Most would not produce enough water to fix
our problems. And trust me, someone’s going to fight several
hundred miles of pipe being laid across their land to make this
happen. -Written by Joanna Allhands, an Arizona Republic
columnist.
On the federal government’s drought map, the hardest-hit areas
— the driest of the dry — are shaded in crimson red. Looking at
the current map, the coloring makes it appear that someone
plunged a knife into Southern Nevada, and blood flowed to
portions of California, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and even
Texas. One glance at this map and any reasonable person would
understand that the region needs to take its water conservation
efforts up several notches.
A crippling drought — largely connected to climate change — is
gripping the Western United States, affecting over 70 million
people and around 40% of the U.S. … Farmers,
scientists, tribal officials, foresters and other groups
affected by the worsening drought testified at a House Natural
Resources Subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife hearing on
Tuesday, asking lawmakers for both short-term relief and
long-term solutions from the worsening conditions.
Arizona and other Western states just lived through the driest
year in more than a century, with no drought relief in sight in
the near future, experts told a House panel Tuesday. The period
from last April to this March was the driest in the last 126
years for Arizona and other Western states, witnesses said. It
caps a two-decade stretch that was the driest in more than 100
years that records have been kept – and one of the driest in
the past 1,200 years based on paleohydrology evidence, one
official said.
The USGS will collect high-resolution aerial imagery over
Grand Canyon National Park for approximately one week beginning
Saturday, May 29, to document, observe and track long-term
ecosystem changes in the Colorado River.
The [Colorado] state water board is encouraging all nine basin
roundtables to adopt a code of conduct requiring members to
communicate in a professional, respectful, truthful and
courteous way. But some Western Slope roundtables are pushing
back. Over roughly the last month, Colorado Water Conservation
Board Director Rebecca Mitchell has been visiting the remote
roundtable meetings on Zoom, answering questions about the code
of conduct and urging the roundtables to adopt it. The goal of
the document is to make sure everyone feels comfortable
speaking up in meetings.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office, by way of written
communication, has notified Imperial Irrigation District Board
Vice President J.B. Hamby of his appointment to the state’s
Colorado River Board. … For the past 75 years the
Colorado River Board of California’s mission has been to
protect the interests and rights of the State of California,
its agencies and citizens, in the water and power resources of
the Colorado River system.
A massive new data center is set to be built in Mesa, Arizona,
after the City Council voted in favor of a controversial
development agreement. Critics noted that the huge facility
would consume millions of gallons of water as the city and
state struggle with dwindling supplies. The company behind the
project has hidden its identity, operating via the pseudonym
Redale LLC.
The Arizona Legislature wants to look into the feasibility of
pumping water from the Mississippi River to Arizona. But the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has already studied the idea, and
weighed in on the project in 2012. The agency studied factors
such as cost, legal issues, power use and the amount of time
the project would take. A report estimated the project could
cost up to $14 billion; the timetable was around 30
years.
When you oversee the largest supplier of treated water in the
United States, you tend to think big. Jeff Kightlinger, general
manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California for the last 15 years, … discussed how his
agency is poised to handle drought, the roadmap for
sustainability on the Colorado River and why he believes
practicality and necessity will pave the way for the completion
of a Delta alternative conveyance facility for the State Water
Project.
The scale of the drought hitting the American West is beginning
to crystallize as Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona experienced
their driest year in terms of precipitation on record,
according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
In Utah and California, it was the second-driest winter on
record. For Wyoming, it was the third-driest ever. For
Colorado, only three winters were ever drier in the 127-year
history of record-keeping at the center.
Declining levels at the second-largest reservoir in the U.S.
have spurred officials in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New
Mexico to search for ways to prop it up. Lake Powell on the
Colorado River is dropping rapidly amid one of the southwestern
watershed’s driest years on record. It’s currently forecast to
be at 29% of capacity by the end of September — the lowest
level since the reservoir first started filling in 1963. Its
sister reservoir downstream on the Colorado River, Lake Mead,
is also approaching a record low this year.
When you oversee the largest
supplier of treated water in the United States, you tend to think
big.
Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California for the last 15 years, has
focused on diversifying his agency’s water supply and building
security through investment. That means looking beyond MWD’s
borders to ensure the reliable delivery of water to two-thirds of
California’s population.
Beavers, known for their work ethic, tenacity and sometimes
destructive instincts, are making a comeback in the worlds of
science and water as researchers look for natural ways to
restore rivers and wetlands and improve the health of
drought-stressed aquifers. … This fall, Colorado
Headwaters, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting and
restoring headwater regions in the state, is sponsoring
a beaver summit, a conference designed to unveil some of
the latest ecological research on creatures once valued only
for their glossy fur.
Arizona’s drought has lawmakers looking into drawing water from
the Mississippi River to be used here in the desert. “This kind
of project would be looking 20 years down the road,” said
Republican Rep. Tim Dunn from Yuma. Dunn sponsored
House Concurrent Memorial 2004, which got bipartisan support in
the Arizona legislature, and urges Congress to study a plan for
a pipeline that would take water out of the Mississippi River
near Davenport, Iowa.
Severe drought — largely connected to climate change — is
ravaging … the entire Western half of the United States, from
the Pacific Coast, across the Great Basin and desert Southwest,
and up through the Rockies to the Northern Plains. In
California, wells are drying up, forcing some homeowners to
drill new ones that are deeper and costlier. Lake Mead, on the
border of Arizona and Nevada, is so drained of Colorado River
water that the two states are facing the eventual possibility
of cuts in their supply.
Millions of people are betting on Arizona. They’re buying
homes, starting businesses, and families. The future of how we
use our water resources may dictate the future of their
success. … That question was addressed four decades earlier
with the Groundwater Management Act of 1980. The idea was the
law would ensure when water was taken out, just as much was put
back in, creating what they called a safe yield goal by
2025. Unfortunately, a new study released by ASU
researchers with the Kyl Center shows the law is not living up
to its promise as deep, thousands of years old aquifers
continue to be over-pumped.
The drought has some members of the Arizona Legislature
wondering if the state should look for a new source of water:
the Mississippi River. Conservationists wonder if lawmakers
should try a different approach. As Arizona braces for a
drought contingency plan to kick in, the Legislature has
floated the idea of damming the Mississippi and piping the
water here. The idea received overwhelming support among
lawmakers, though it is unclear if the project is viable. Sandy
Bahr, with the Sierra Club, told KJZZ’s The Show last month the
state needs to adjust its thinking about water, especially in
times of drought.
A federal appeals court has rebuked the U.S. government for
failing to properly consider the interest of Native American
nations in developing allocation guidelines for the Colorado
River Basin’s waters and ordered it to prioritize obligations
assumed when it signed a treaty with the Navajo Nation in 1868.
The April 28 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
may boost Native American negotiating clout as the basin’s
states ponder how to address impacts of ongoing drought in the
region.
It’s May, but there’s still snow in Colorado’s mountains near
the headwaters of the South Platte River. [Brian] Domonkos, the
Colorado Snow Survey supervisor, gets to work measuring how
much snowpack is left from the winter to runoff into streams,
rivers and reservoirs this summer. These mountains trap snow in
a natural reservoir. As it melts, it becomes the primary source
of water for Colorado and much of the West. Climate change is
disrupting this delicate system in multiple ways. The overall
trend shows less snowpack accumulation due to warmer
temperatures.
The Colorado River is flowing again in its delta. This is a big
deal for a river that has not flowed through its delta in most
years since the 1960s, resulting in an ecosystem that is
severely desiccated and devastated. Thanks to commitments from
the United States and Mexico in the Colorado River binational
agreement—Minute 323 – 35,000 acre-feet of water (11.4
billion gallons) dedicated to create environmental benefits
will be delivered to the river from May 1 to October 11. The
expectation is that this will create and support habitat for
birds like the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Yuma Ridgway’s Rail, and
Vermilion Flycatcher, and give life to the many plants and
animals in this ribbon oasis of green in the midst of the
Sonoran Desert.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced
on Thursday that a key weather feature that affects global
temperature and precipitation has shifted into a “neutral,” or
average, state. La Niña, one of the factors behind last year’s
extremely active Atlantic hurricane season and a contributor to
below-average rainfall in the South and Southwest, has faded
away….In California, any drought relief associated with the
end of La Niña won’t come during the dry season that runs well
into next fall.
Beavers, known for their work ethic, tenacity and sometimes
destructive instincts, are making a comeback in the worlds of
science and water as researchers look for natural ways to
restore rivers and wetlands and improve the health of
drought-stressed aquifers. … This fall, Colorado Headwaters,
a nonprofit that advocates for protecting and restoring
headwater regions in the state, is sponsoring a beaver summit,
a conference designed to unveil some of the latest ecological
research on creatures once valued only for their glossy fur.
Ben Tobin has questions about the Grand Canyon’s caves. The
University of Kentucky geologist started learning about caves
as a young man, in part because his mother was a geologist, and
a childhood fascination grew over time. … When he was in
college, an internship in Arkansas doing cave tours got him
hooked, and eventually his work brought him out West, to Grand
Canyon National Park. Tobin specializes in what’s known as
karst hydrology. These are underground systems made up of
soluble rock such as limestone. To Tobin, caves are like
another world, with blind animals, fossils and archeological
finds.
Only one week remains to register for our May 20 virtual
Lower
Colorado River Tour where you can hear directly
from experts offering a range of perspectives on the most
contested and meticulously managed river in the United
States. Practically every drop of water in the
Colorado River is already allocated, but pressure on the
hard-working river continues to grow from myriad sources —
increasing population, declining habitat and climate
change.
A riverbed that has been parched since the end of the
19th century — a portion of the historic lifeblood of the
Gila River Indian Community — is now coursing again with water,
luring things like cattails and birds back to its
shores. … The revival of this small segment of the
649-mile (1045-kilometer) Gila River, which has served the
tribes that make up the Gila River Indian Community — the
Akimel O’odham (Pima) and the Pee-Posh (Maricopa) — for roughly
2,000 years, was an added benefit of a grassroots
infrastructure overhaul, known as “managed aquifer recharge,”
or MAR, which aimed to restore the local groundwater
basin.
As Californians can tell by the already beige hills, the early
fire weather warnings and the dusty umbrellas sitting deep
inside closets, it’s been drier than usual this winter. And
according to decades worth of precipitation data, that’s the
new normal. What’s considered “normal” for baseline rainfall
amounts is determined by a 30-year average that gets
recalculated every decade. The latest recalculation, according
to Jan Null, a forecaster who runs Golden Gate Weather
Services, “show a noticeably drier state” through 2020 compared
to the previous “normal” calculation covering 1981 through
2010.
Spring is generally a time of renewal for the watersheds of the
western United States. Warmed by the lengthening days, the
region’s towering mountain ranges shed their mantle of snow,
releasing freshets of water into welcoming streams and
reservoirs. This year, though, the cycle is in disarray.
Outside of the Olympic and Cascade ranges of Washington state,
winter snows were subpar. The spring melt has been a dud. From
the Klamath to the Colorado and Rio Grande, watersheds are
under stress once again, and water managers face difficult
tradeoffs between farms, fisheries, and at-home uses.
Arizona legislators are looking eastward to ease the impact of
a two-decade drought in the Colorado River Basin. According to
Arizona Rep. Tim Dunn, who represents the area of Yuma, the
Legislature is asking Congress to fund a technological and
feasibility study for diverting floodwater from the Mississippi
River to replenish the Colorado River. Whether that comes in
the form of a diversion dam or pipeline, Dunn says the plan
would benefit both the Midwestern and Southwestern United
States.
Newly released emails reveal that lawyers and lobbyists for
mining companies, developers and the agriculture industry had a
hand behind the scenes in shaping Arizona’s newly adopted law
on clean-water rules for rivers and streams. The emails
show the involvement of these influential groups went beyond
their public endorsements of the legislation. Their lawyers and
lobbyists were given access to offer input while the final
legislation was being drafted, and the emails show they
suggested specific language, offered “wordsmithing” tweaks and
requested significant changes that state officials incorporated
into the bill.
Many dryland cities like Los Angeles, Cairo and Tehran have
already outstripped natural water recharge, but are expected to
continue growing, resulting in a deepening arid urban water
crisis. … The situations in arid and semi-arid cities
like Phoenix, Arizona; Bamako, Mali; or Dubai, UAE, differ in
their particulars, but rhyme in their impending disastrous
trajectory. These, and other arid-region cities, are
approaching the edge of an ecological cliff: dependent on
sustaining growth, which itself requires a growth in water
supplied by faraway and finite sources, and delivered by aging
infrastructure. But water in dryland regions is
getting scarcer and supplies
more unpredictable.
California’s water resources managers are proactively working
with our various partners through the harshest dry year we have
seen in recent memory…. We are encouraged that the
Governor’s drought proclamation will bring important focus on
our precious water resources and inspire balanced approaches
that will allow water resources managers (state, federal and
local) to creatively manage our limited water supplies this
year for multiple benefits.
Arizona cities, towns, farmers and ranchers are preparing for
the first-ever cuts to the state’s allotment of Colorado River
water. The cuts are the result of a drought that’s lasted 26
years and will likely take effect in 2022. The so-called “Tier
1″ water shortage will affect some water users more severely
than others. … Farmers and ranchers in Pinal County are
already preparing, but it’s going to be a costly process.
In 2020, the Salton Sea was described by Palm Springs Life
Magazine as “the biggest environmental disaster in California
history.” With the largest lake in California holding such a
bleak title, it’s amazing how obscure its legacy is. Over
spring break, we decided to go on a road trip to visit an
eccentric settlement in the middle of the lower Colorado
desert, known as a Slab City. This settlement is most well
known for being a site of post-apocalyptic garbage art and a
home for colorful nomads. Due to its libertarian ethos, it is
billed as the “last free place in America.”
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a clear connection between
access to clean water and public health, according to Navajo
tribal member Bidtah Becker. Becker is part of a group called
the Water & Tribes Initiative that advocates for water access
in Indian Country. She said the pandemic has made it easier to
ask Congress for money to solve the problem.
The Colorado River Basin appears to be out of miracles this
spring. Five years after a “Miracle May” of record rainfall
staved off what had appeared to be the river’s first imminent
shortage in water deliveries, the hope for another in 2021 “is
fading quickly,” says the Colorado Basin River Forecast
Center’s latest report, released Thursday. That’s one more
piece of bad news for the Central Arizona Project. A first-time
shortage is now likely to slash deliveries of river water to
Central Arizona farmers starting in 2022 but won’t affect
drinking water supplies for Tucson, Phoenix and other cities,
or for tribes and industries that get CAP water.
The dispute between Imperial Valley farmer Mike Abatti and the
Imperial Irrigation District over water rights entered a new
chapter last month. Mr. Abatti filed a petition for certiorari
to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the court to review last
year’s California appellate court’s ruling in the IID’s favor.
Our local Imperial County Farm Bureau and the California Farm
Bureau, along with some individual valley farmers, then filed
amicus briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Mr. Abatti’s
petition for review. Mr.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a landmark water protection bill
Wednesday to ensure clean water in nearly 800 Arizona streams,
lakes and rivers that are critical for everyday use. The
legislation will preserve water quality, list protected Arizona
waters and develop management practices that will protect the
waterways.
Arizona is gearing up for the first-ever “Tier 1” shortage on
the Colorado River in 2022, which will trigger significant cuts
to the state’s annual allocation from its most important water
resource. As daunting as it sounds, the vast majority of
citizens and businesses will not be affected, state water
leaders said during a Colorado River Preparedness briefing last
week. Arizona is also well prepared to weather expected
shortages the next few years, and is in the process of
developing the next steps to protect and augment the river’s
supplies as the drought persists, said the state’s top two
water leaders.
Early May water supply volume forecasts are below to much below
normal throughout the Colorado River Basin and Great Basin.
Upper Colorado River Basin water supply forecasts range between
15-75% of the 1981-2010 historical April-July average. Great
Basin water supply forecasts are 10-70% of average. … Many
April-July volume forecasts fall in the bottom (driest) five on
record….The Lake Powell inflow forecast is 2.0 MAF (28% of
average), a 17% decrease from April….
Hear directly from a range of experts offering a variety of
perspectives on our May 20 virtual Lower Colorado River Tour as
they put into context the 20-plus year drought on what is the
most contested and meticulously managed river in the United
States. Among the experts featured are farmers, tribal
representatives, and managers from wildlife agencies, water
districts, the Bureau of Reclamation and others who will
discuss drought impacts, habitat projects, farming and
restoration efforts at the Salton Sea.
After one of the most destructive and extreme wildfire seasons
in modern history last year, a widening drought across
California and much of the West has many residents bracing for
the possibility this season could be worse. Anemic winter rain
and snowfall has left reservoirs and river flows down
significantly, even as the state experiences its driest water
year in more than four decades. Today, wildfire fuels in some
parts of California are at or near record levels of dryness.
Melting snow and flowing irrigation ditches mean spring has
finally arrived at the base of Grand Mesa in western
Colorado. Harts Basin Ranch, a 3,400-acre expanse of
hayfields and pasture just south of Cedaredge, in Delta County,
is coming back to life with the return of water. … The
ranch has the No. 1 priority water right — meaning the oldest,
which comes with the ability to use the creek’s water first —
dating to 1881. … [The ranch's owners] have been
accused of water speculation — which means buying up the ranch
just for its senior water rights and hoarding them for a future
profit.
Gov. Doug Ducey has asked the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
to address groundwater contamination near military
installations in Arizona. In an Apr. 27 letter to Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin, Gov. Ducey requested DOD to identify and
treat water in Arizona contaminated in the areas surrounding
four DOD installations and to prevent additional human exposure
to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from other DOD
facilities in Arizona, which impact the groundwater. … These
bases are located in the two most populous metropolitan areas
in Arizona and each is surrounded by thousands of Arizonans who
rely on clean groundwater for drinking water purposes.
Many miles of streams and rivers in the United States and
elsewhere are polluted by toxic metals in acidic runoff
draining from abandoned mining sites, and major investments
have been made to clean up acid mine drainage at some sites. A
new study based on long-term monitoring data from four sites in
the western United States shows that cleanup efforts can allow
affected streams to recover to near natural conditions within
10 to 15 years after the start of abatement work. The four
mining-impacted watersheds—located in mountain mining regions
of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana—were all designated
as Superfund sites …
The official “new normal” for the U.S. climate is warmer than
ever before — and the changes are ominous for California,
experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration on Tuesday released its new climate averages,
based on the 30-year period from 1991 to 2020. The averages,
known as “climate normals,” are updated every 10 years, and
they show most of the country, including California, heating
up. “The influence of long-term global warming is obvious,” the
NOAA said in announcing the updates to its averages.
In 2021, access to running water and clean drinking water is a
given for most Americans. The Census Bureau has even considered
dropping a question on plumbing access from the U.S. census
questionnaire. But many of the nation’s tribes still lack
running water, access to clean water, and even flushing
toilets. Native American households are 19 times more likely
than white households to lack indoor plumbing, according to the
U.S. Water Alliance, and more likely to lack piped water
services than any other racial group. That problem is at an
inflection point for the Navajo Nation and 29 other tribes in
the Colorado River Basin, which stretches from the Rocky
Mountains to Mexico.
In today’s Home Grown, a local lawsuit over ownership of the
Colorado River water might be taken higher to the U.S. Supreme
Court. The Michael Abatti versus the Imperial Irrigation
District (IID) lawsuit has been ongoing in the valley,
disputing over whether water rights belong to the landowners or
if they are controlled by the IID. … Abatti won the lawsuit
in Imperial County Superior Court, but Katie Turner, attorney
with Sutherland and Gerber says it didn’t make it to the
California Supreme Court.
The US Bureau of Reclamation last week warned water users to
brace for a 500,000 acre-foot cut in water from the Colorado
River as a historic drought continues to tighten its grip on
the Southwest. The cutback comes on top of a 200,000 acre-foot
reduction Arizona water users agreed to last year in an effort
to put off this day of reckoning. The Central Arizona Project
provides more than a third of the state’s water. The reductions
will mostly impact farmers. The sparse snowpack this winter
soaked into the ground during the hot, dry spring — producing
little runoff.
A recent report looked into why Indigenous communities within
the Colorado River Basin are struggling to get clean, reliable
running water. A household in tribal lands is 19 times more
likely than a white household to not have indoor plumbing, and
during the pandemic this had catastrophic effects on some
Indigenous communities. According a 2019 report outlining the
action plan for closing the water access gap throughout the
United States, “race is the strongest predictor of water and
sanitation access,” and it’s Indigenous people who face this
problem most.
Ever since I started working on Colorado River issues, I have
wanted to travel through the iconic landscape of the Grand
Canyon by boat. I was skeptical of my chances given the highly
coveted and limited number of permits, but this spring I was
lucky enough to be invited on a private trip. For 21 days, we
traveled through this remote stretch where the canyon walls
tower up to 4,000 feet above the river in some places. We
celebrated on the downstream side of big rapids and scrambled
up forgotten side canyons. We spied great blue herons and
merganser ducks on the river’s edge. We saw very few other
people.
With the Colorado River’s largest reservoir just 38% full and
declining toward the threshold of a first-ever shortage,
Arizona water officials convened an online meeting this week to
outline how the state will deal with water cutbacks, saying the
reductions will be “painful” but plans are in place to lessen
the blow for affected farmers next year. Lake Mead’s decline is
expected to trigger substantial reductions in water deliveries
in 2022 for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico. The largest of those
cuts will affect Arizona, slashing its Colorado River supplies
by 512,000 acre-feet, about a fifth of its total entitlement.
President Biden’s pick this week to oversee the Army’s vast
natural resources operation would bring to the job decades of
water experience at the Interior Department and on Capitol
Hill. The president tapped Michael Connor to be the Department
of Defense’s assistant secretary of the Army for civil works,
which oversees the Army Corps of Engineers and its huge network
of dams and other projects. Connor would play a major role in
some of the most controversial projects facing the Biden
administration in the environmental arena, including the
Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, as well as Clean Water
Act permitting.
In a note of consolation for the pain some Arizona water users
will feel if Central Arizona Project supplies are cut next
year, state water leaders said Thursday: It will be planned
pain. Federal officials have said it’s likely Lake Mead at the
Nevada border will be low enough at the end of 2021 to trigger
the first major cutback in CAP deliveries to the Arizona’s
parched midsection. Arizona will lose 512,000 acre-feet of its
CAP supply — almost one-third of the $4 billion project’s total
supply, according to a 2019 drought contingency plan.
The Nevada Assembly voted Thursday to approve a non-residential
turf removal proposal brought by Southern Nevada water
regulators, who say it will save the water-shy Las Vegas Valley
12 billion gallons of water per year. With little debate from
lawmakers, the Assembly voted 30-12 on Assembly Bill 356,
sending the proposal to the Senate. Four Republicans — Glen
Leavitt, R-Boulder City, Heidi Kasama, R-Las Vegas, Melissa
Hardy, R-Henderson, and Jill Tolles, R-Reno — crossed party
lines to vote with the 26 Democrats.
The Navajo Nation can pursue its lawsuit seeking to force the
federal government to secure water from the Colorado River for
the reservation, the Ninth Circuit said Wednesday, reversing a
lower court’s dismissal of the tribe’s breach of trust claim.
The tribe doesn’t seek a judge’s determination of its rights to
the river, which the Interior Department says would fall under
the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, according to the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Instead, the tribe
seeks an order for Interior to determine the extent to which it
needs water, to develop a plan to secure…
Water officials in Arizona say they are prepared to lose about
one-fifth of the water the state gets from the Colorado River
in what could be the first federally declared shortage in the
river that supplies millions of people in the U.S. West and
Mexico. Arizona stands to lose more than any other state in the
Colorado River basin that also takes in parts of Wyoming, New
Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and California. That’s because
Arizona agreed long ago to be the first in line for cuts in
exchange for federal funding for a canal system to deliver the
water to Arizona’s major metropolitan areas.
In what may become an iconic image for drought-stricken
California, Gov. Gavin Newsom stood on the parched bed of Lake
Mendocino on April 21 to announce an emergency declaration for
Sonoma and Mendocino counties. … [T]he reservoir was at a
historically low 43% of capacity, the harbinger of what could
be a devastating drought cycle not only for the Northern
California counties that fell within his drought declaration,
but for most of the state — indeed, the American
West. -Written by Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times
columnist.
Gov. Doug Ducey on April 21 signed a bill that provides larger
grants for developing water projects in rural areas, but
questions linger on whether there will be any money for
them. House Bill 2388, sponsored by Rep. Gail Griffin,
R-Hereford, expands the amount of a single grant from the Water
Supply Development Revolving Fund from $100,000 to
$250,000. The recipient water provider must be
located in a county with a population of fewer than 1.5 million
people. While Griffin said the fund isn’t just
meant for rural areas, some experts who work with water believe
the benefits can greatly help many rural communities.
Arizona may be facing its first official declaration of water
shortage next year, a move that would trigger water cutbacks of
512,000 acre-feet — almost 20% of Arizona’s Colorado River
entitlement — affecting mainly agricultural users. The
24-Month Study on the Colorado River system, released this
month by the Bureau of Reclamation, projects that in
June water levels in Lake Mead will fall below 1,075 feet
for the first time, which would put the state in a Tier 1
shortage.
While a decades-long battle over one major dam and river
diversion in northern Colorado appeared to end last week,
environmental groups signaled another fight will go on longer
as they filed an appeal meant to undermine Denver Water’s Gross
Dam expansion. The environmental coalition Monday asked
the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to review a dismissal of
their case by a federal district court and order a trial on the
merits of their claims about the dangers of adding 131 feet to
the height of Gross Reservoir Dam. They argue federal review
agencies neglected species-protection laws and other guidelines
when handing Denver Water a permit for Gross.
The first automated dust-on-snow monitoring technology in the
mountains of Northwest Colorado is expected to be installed
this fall to study the impact of dust from arid landscapes on
downwind mountain ecosystems in the state and in Utah. McKenzie
Skiles, who is a hydrologist and a University of Utah assistant
professor, will use close to $10,000 from a National Science
Foundation grant to purchase four pyranometers, which measure
solar radiation landing on, and reflected by, snow.
The Colorado River cuts through the Grand Canyon, providing
water for about 40 million people and 5 and a half million
acres of farmland. To some, the water is as valuable as
oil. In 1922, the seven U.S. states through which the
river flows signed onto the Colorado River Compact, a
water-sharing agreement that divvies up the river’s annual
flow. The water must be shared equally between Upper Basin
states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico; and the Lower
Basin: California, Arizona and Nevada. There’s been infighting
ever since.
The water level of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir,
has dropped more than 130 feet since the beginning of 2000,
when the lake’s surface lapped at the spillway gates on Hoover
Dam. Twenty-one years later, with the Colorado River
consistently yielding less water as the climate has grown
warmer and drier, the reservoir near Las Vegas sits at just 39%
of capacity. … The river’s reservoirs are shrinking as
the Southwest endures an especially severe bout of dryness
within a two-decade drought intensified by climate
change, one of the driest periods in centuries that shows no
sign of letting up.
A complex Front Range dam-building project that includes
transferring water from the Colorado River will move forward
this summer after Northern Water agreed to a settlement putting
$15 million in trust for waterway improvements in Grand
County. Environmental opponents begrudgingly accepted the
mediated settlement of their lawsuit against Northern Water’s
Windy Gap Firming Project, which involves a menu of waterworks
construction including Chimney Hollow dam near Loveland and
rerouting the Colorado River around Windy Gap Dam near Granby.
The Biden administration has launched a working group focused
on addressing drought conditions in the West as the region
continues to suffer from a long period of water scarcity. The
group, which will be co-chaired by the departments of the
Interior and Agriculture, will work with state, local and
tribal governments on community needs in weathering drought,
according to a news release from the Interior Department.
Following a temporary delay in Colorado federal court, the
Trump administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR)
will now take effect in Colorado on April 23, 2021. Under
the NWPR, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
Army Corps of Engineers will no longer require permits for
operations affecting certain categories of streams and wetland
areas previously subject to the Clean Water Act.
Visit key infrastructure and environmental restoration
sites along the lower Colorado River during our online
tour May 20 of the iconic river as it weaves through the
Lower Basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona. Our
Lower Colorado
River Tour starts at Hoover Dam near Las Vegas and
stops at major agricultural regions, tourist
destinations and key wildlife areas such as the Salton Sea
and a wildlife refuge in Yuma, Ariz. resulting from a
tribal-city partnership.
