As adjacent Western states, California and Nevada share similar
issues related to drought and limited water resources. Both
states are participants in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and
the 2003 and 2007 Quantification Settlement Agreements to
allocate Colorado River deliveries. Also, about two-thirds of
Lake Tahoe lies in California and one-third in Nevada, and the
two states have formed a compact to work together on
environmental goals for the lake.
It is mid-May, and a couple of days ago, the Hermits Peak Fire
in northern New Mexico reached 299,565 acres in size,
surpassing the 2012 Whitewater-Baldy Fire as the state’s
largest wildfire on record. … It is mid-May, and a dozen
other fires have already charred tens of thousands of acres
across the West … It is mid-May, and the spring winds have
been relentless … It is mid-May, and the temperature in
Phoenix has reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit two days in a row.
As drought and climate change tighten their grip on the
American West, the sight of fountains, swimming pools, gardens
and golf courses in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los
Angeles, Salt Lake City, Boise, and Albuquerque can be jarring
at first glance. Western water experts, however, say they
aren’t necessarily cause for concern. Over the past three
decades, major Western cities — particularly in California and
Nevada — have diversified their water sources, boosted local
supplies through infrastructure investments and conservation,
and use water more efficiently.
The water crisis in Arizona affects all of us. From our tap
water to our crops, even our electricity. The supply is running
short, so FOX 10’s Steve Nielsen headed to Lake Powell to
investigate our ongoing water crisis and uncover what’s being
done to safeguard our most important resource in the desert.
… Lake Powell historical data in 2011 shows the water
level was at 3,622 feet. It ebbs and flows a little bit every
year, but there’s been a steep drop off the last two
years. As of May 2022, the water level is sitting at
3,522.
The [discoveries of human remains on the dry bed bed of
Lake Mead] come amid the Southwest’s driest two decades in
more than a thousand years, as drought-starved bodies of water
yield one surprise after another. At Elephant Butte Reservoir
in New Mexico, a bachelor party stumbled across a fossilized
mastodon skull that is millions of years old. In Utah last
year, the receding waters of Lake Powell revealed a car that
had plunged 600 feet off a cliff, killing the driver. And as
Lake Powell dries up, archaeologists are getting a chance to
study newly emerged Indigenous dwellings.
The central and upper Midwest, Texas and Southern California
face an increased risk of power outages this summer from
extreme heat, wildfires and extended drought, the nation’s grid
monitor warned yesterday. In a dire new assessment, the North
American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) described regions of
the country pushed closer than ever toward energy emergencies
by a combination of climate change impacts and a transition
from traditional fossil fuel generators to carbon-free
renewable power.
The Colorado River plays a pivotal role in the American West,
supplying water to more than 40 million people, irrigating 5
million acres of farmland, and providing critical habitat for
rare fish, birds and plants. But demand for the Colorado’s
water far exceeds supply in the fast-growing Southwest, as a
climate change-fueled megadrought and rising temperatures place
an unprecedented strain on the iconic river, The Washington
Post’s Karin Brulliard, Matt McClain and Erin Patrick O’Connor
report.
A body in a barrel. Human bones along the shoreline. Ghost
towns. A crashed B-29 Superfortress used to track cosmic rays.
Prehistoric salt mines. What will the rapidly receding waters
of Lake Mead reveal next? “This is just the tip of the
iceberg,” said Travis Heggie, a former National Park Service
official who has studied deaths at Lake Mead Recreation Area.
“I’m expecting all sorts of criminal things to show up, and I
mean a lot.”
Las Vegas is being flooded with lore about organized crime
after a second set of human remains emerged within a week from
the depths of a drought-stricken Colorado River reservoir just
a 30-minute drive from the notoriously mob-founded Strip. …
[B]oaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted
barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline. … A
few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news
crew, not far from the first. It was empty. On Saturday,
two sisters from suburban Henderson who were paddle boarding on
the lake near a former marina resort noticed bones on a newly
surfaced sand bar …
Over the past four decades, the Western U.S. has demanded more
water. And the landscapes — the valleys and mountains and
lakes — that make up the region’s arid ecosystems have borne
the impacts of increasing water needs in more ways than one.
It’s not only fast-growing cities, searching for faraway
supplies, that have affected these landscapes. The
atmosphere itself has become thirstier, using up, and
potentially evaporating, more water from the land beneath it.
Researchers describe this as increased evaporative demand …
Reporting on clean energy from my kitchen table is one thing.
Standing atop the Continental Divide — wind whipping at my
face, construction workers grading roads nearby, pronghorn
jogging across the sagebrush landscape — is something else
entirely. … As we stood on Miller Hill — which is not named
for the Anschutz executive — we looked west over lands where
rainfall drains into the Little Snake River, later flowing into
the Yampa River, the Green, the Colorado and eventually the
Gulf of California — unless it’s diverted first to grow crops,
or to provide drinking water for cities such as Los Angeles or
Las Vegas. Written by LA Times energy columnist Sammy Roth.
Under a state law passed last year that is the first of its
kind in the nation, patches of grass like this, found along
streets and at housing developments and commercial sites in and
around Las Vegas, must be removed in favor of more
desert-friendly landscaping. The offense? They are
“nonfunctional,” serving only an aesthetic purpose. Seldom, if
ever, walked on and kept alive by sprinklers, they are wasting
a resource, water, that has become increasingly precious.
Momentum is building for a unique interstate deal that aims to
transform wastewater from Southern California homes and
business into relief for the stressed Colorado River. The
collaborative effort to add resiliency to a river suffering
from overuse, drought and climate change is being shaped across
state lines by some of the West’s largest water
agencies. Southern California’s giant wholesaler,
Metropolitan Water District, claims a multi-billion-dollar
water recycling proposal will not only create a new local
source for its 19 million customers, but allow it to share part
of its Colorado River supply …
Momentum is building for a unique
interstate deal that aims to transform wastewater from Southern
California homes and business into relief for the stressed
Colorado River. The collaborative effort to add resiliency to a
river suffering from overuse, drought and climate change is being
shaped across state lines by some of the West’s largest water
agencies.
Over the last century, cities including Los Angeles, Phoenix
and Las Vegas reshaped the American West by building coal
plants, hydropower dams and nuclear reactors to fuel their
growth. Now those cities are on the verge of doing it again,
only this time with solar panels, wind turbines, long-distance
transmission lines and lithium mines. These proposals are
igniting opposition from conservationists, tribal activists and
rural residents looking to protect landscapes and ecosystems —
and at times their way of life.
The country’s largest man-made reservoir, Lake Mead, has
dropped to such a historically low level that Las Vegas water
officials have completed the process of turning on a pump
station that will allow Southern Nevada to retrieve water, even
under extreme conditions. The move — to turn on the pump
station full bore — is an indication of how low Lake Mead
has fallen over the past decade and serves as a bulwark against
the possibility of Las Vegas losing physical access to its
water as regional issues on the Colorado River become
increasingly dire.
In the rolling hills around San Diego and its suburbs, the
rumble of bulldozers and the whine of power saws fill the air
as a slew of new homes and apartments rise up. The region is
booming, its population growing at a rate of about 1 percent a
year. This, in spite of the fact that Southern California,
along with much of the West, is in the midst of what experts
call a megadrought that some believe may not be a temporary,
one-off occurrence, but a recurring event or even a climate
change-driven permanent “aridification” of the West.
For the past 15 years, federal agencies have tried to subdue
growing populations of quagga mussels, an invasive species that
interferes with water infrastructure and threatens ecosystems.
Crews tried scrubbing the mollusks off equipment,
power washing them off boats and deploying chlorine and UV
lights to prevent them from settling in pipes. But the tiny
mussels have not only resisted all deterrents, they’ve clogged
cooling equipment, reduced water flow to hydropower and
even changed the water quality, making it less suitable for
native species.
The Colorado River Basin is inching ever closer to “Day Zero,”
a term first used in Cape Town, South Africa when they
anticipated the day in 2018 that taps would run dry. Lakes
Powell and Mead, the Colorado River’s two enormous reservoirs,
were full in 2000, storing more than four years of the river’s
average annual flow. For more than two decades water users have
been sipping at that supply, watching them decline. Long-term
drought and climate change is making this issue potentially
catastrophic.
In March, the water level of Lake Powell declined below a
threshold at which the Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate
power becomes threatened, and the Bureau of Reclamation, the
federal agency that oversees the West’s water infrastructure,
is working with the states above Lake Powell to divert more
water to keep its dam operational. Meanwhile, the states around
Lake Mead have been hashing out the details of a plan to
voluntarily curtail their use to prevent even more dramatic
cuts to Arizona and Nevada from going into effect next year.
In the Southwestern U.S., the massive Lake Mead Reservoir near
Las Vegas is not as massive as it used to be. The water level
has dropped to near-record-low levels. Drought has reduced the
flow of water into the river, which has forced communities to
cut back. … The water authority targeted the lush green
grass that’s not native to the desert, encouraging people to
remove it. … At first, residents and businesses were
slow to pull up their lawns.
If the federal government goes through with its proposal to cut
Colorado River releases from Lake Powell, water users in
Arizona, California and Nevada won’t feel it this year — but
Lake Mead will. Due to what some observers call an accounting
trick, the reduced releases from Lake Powell wouldn’t translate
into immediate cuts or deeper water shortages for the three
Lower Basin states. Instead, the Interior Department’s plan
would lower the already depleted Lake Mead to prop up the even
more depleted Lake Powell…
The lower Colorado River has virtually every drop allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Hyatt Place Las Vegas At Silverton Village
8380 Dean Martin Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89139
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.
This event explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Even as stakeholders in the Colorado River Basin celebrate the recent completion of an unprecedented drought plan intended to stave off a crashing Lake Mead, there is little time to rest. An even larger hurdle lies ahead as they prepare to hammer out the next set of rules that could vastly reshape the river’s future.
Set to expire in 2026, the current guidelines for water deliveries and shortage sharing, launched in 2007 amid a multiyear drought, were designed to prevent disputes that could provoke conflict.
This tour explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs is the focus of this tour.
Silverton Hotel
3333 Blue Diamond Road
Las Vegas, NV 89139
Nowhere is the domino effect in
Western water policy played out more than on the Colorado River,
and specifically when it involves the Lower Basin states of
California, Nevada and Arizona. We are seeing that play out now
as the three states strive to forge a Drought Contingency Plan.
Yet that plan can’t be finalized until Arizona finds a unifying
voice between its major water players, an effort you can read
more about in the latest in-depth article of Western Water.
Even then, there are some issues to resolve just within
California.
It’s high-stakes time in Arizona. The state that depends on the
Colorado River to help supply its cities and farms — and is
first in line to absorb a shortage — is seeking a unified plan
for water supply management to join its Lower Basin neighbors,
California and Nevada, in a coordinated plan to preserve water
levels in Lake Mead before
they run too low.
If the lake’s elevation falls below 1,075 feet above sea level,
the secretary of the Interior would declare a shortage and
Arizona’s deliveries of Colorado River water would be reduced by
320,000 acre-feet. Arizona says that’s enough to serve about 1
million households in one year.
We explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop
of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad
sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and
climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs was the focus of this tour.
Hampton Inn Tropicana
4975 Dean Martin Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89118
This issue of Western Water discusses the challenges
facing the Colorado River Basin resulting from persistent
drought, climate change and an overallocated river, and how water
managers and others are trying to face the future.
This three-day, two-night tour explored the lower Colorado River
where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand
is growing from myriad sources — increasing population,
declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs is the focus of this tour.
Best Western McCarran Inn
4970 Paradise Road
Las Vegas, NV 89119
A companion to the Truckee River Basin Map poster, this 24×36
inch poster, suitable for framing, explores the Carson River, and
its link to the Truckee River. The map includes Lahontan Dam and
Reservoir, the Carson Sink, and the farming areas in the basin.
Map text discusses the region’s hydrology and geography, the
Newlands Project, land and water use within the basin and
wetlands. Development of the map was funded by a grant from the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific Region, Lahontan Basin
Area Office.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, displays
the rivers, lakes and reservoirs, irrigated farmland, urban areas
and Indian reservations within the Truckee River Basin, including
the Newlands Project, Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Map text
explains the issues surrounding the use of the Truckee-Carson
rivers, Lake Tahoe water quality improvement efforts, fishery
restoration and the effort to reach compromise solutions to many
of these issues.
This 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, illustrates the
water resources available for Nevada cities, agriculture and the
environment. It features natural and manmade water resources
throughout the state, including the Truckee and Carson rivers,
Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake and the course of the Colorado River
that forms the state’s eastern boundary.
Redesigned in 2017, this beautiful map depicts the seven
Western states that share the Colorado River with Mexico. The
Colorado River supplies water to nearly 40 million people in
Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
and the country of Mexico. Text on this beautiful, 24×36-inch
map, which is suitable for framing, explains the river’s
apportionment, history and the need to adapt its management for
urban growth and expected climate change impacts.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Nevada Water provides an
overview of the history of water development and use in Nevada.
It includes sections on Nevada’s water rights laws, the history
of the Truckee and Carson rivers, water supplies for the Las
Vegas area, groundwater, water quality, environmental issues and
today’s water supply challenges.
The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people and 4
million acres of farmland in a region encompassing some 246,000
square miles in the southwestern United States. The 32-page
Layperson’s Guide to the Colorado River covers the history of the
river’s development; negotiations over division of its water; the
items that comprise the Law of the River; and a chronology of
significant Colorado River events.
This printed issue of Western Water examines how the various
stakeholders have begun working together to meet the planning
challenges for the Colorado River Basin, including agreements
with Mexico, increased use of conservation and water marketing,
and the goal of accomplishing binational environmental
restoration and water-sharing programs.
This issue of Western Water examines the challenges facing state,
federal and tribal officials and other stakeholders as they work
to manage terminal lakes. It includes background information on
the formation of these lakes, and overviews of the water quality,
habitat and political issues surrounding these distinctive bodies
of water. Much of the information in this article originated at
the September 2004 StateManagement Issues at Terminal Water
Bodies/Closed Basins conference.
