by The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said today that Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, might experience worrying decreases in the years to come following one of the driest years for the Colorado River in decades.
Although California will be exempt due to its senior claims to the river’s water, federal officials once again urged Arizona and Nevada to reduce their supply from the overfished river.
As anticipated, the two-year forecast today heightens tensions between the seven Colorado River basin states, who have had difficulty reaching a consensus on how to manage the river after 2026, when the current regulations come to an end.
There has never been a more pressing need for the seven states that make up the Colorado River Basin to come to a consensus. In a statement, Acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Scott Cameron of the Department of the Interior said, “We cannot afford to delay.”
States in the lower basin As they bargain over diminishing water resources, upper-basin states Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico are at conflict with California, Arizona, and Nevada.
Right now, we’re kind just gazing at the situation. However, California’s top negotiator and chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, J.B. Hamby, told CalMatters that the closer it gets, the more difficult it becomes.
The upper-basin states were likewise the target of Hamby’s scathing remarks.
We cannot be the only ones responsible for the Colorado River’s future. In a statement, he continued, “We must make sure that everyone in the basin assumes responsibility for safeguarding the river’s future.”
In response, Colorado’s commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission, Becky Mitchell, wrote in an email: “A basin states consensus is likely if the lower basin can join us in adapting to a drier river.”
Basin states have been advised by federal officials to finalize the general terms of an agreement by November 11 or face the possibility of the U.S. government enforcing its own.
Cameron said at a June conference that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is not anticipating that. But he will if there isn’t a seven-state agreement.
California has a lot on the line. California uses the largest portion of the Colorado River water for metropolitan Southern California through the Metropolitan Water District and for irrigating half a million acres of winter vegetables, alfalfa, and other crops in the Imperial Valley. California receives more than half of the electricity produced at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam.
“California water suppliers are also in parallel talks about how to share future shortages among themselves and with Arizona as negotiators wrangle over a seven-state deal,” said Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District.
That is made more difficult by the dropping water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, he continued.
“We’ve done record amounts of conservation, but it’s still not enough,” Hasencamp stated. Compared to the dry years, we have considerably more work ahead of us.
Dividing up a shrinking river
The water of the Colorado River, a key source for 40 million people, seven U.S. states, two Mexican states, 30 federally recognized tribal groups, and 5.5 million acres of agricultural land, has been shared for more than a century by a series of agreements, treaties, and legal arrangements.
Demand has long exceeded availability, and the river has been starved in recent decades due to megadrought and aridification brought on by climate change, drying up the equivalent of Lake Mead by 2021.
By the summer of 2022, the river’s enormous reservoirs had fallen to unprecedented lows due to the driest 23-year stretch in more than a century. The Biden administration was forced to demand emergency reduction or risk federal intervention since it was a disaster for the basin.
However, Lake Powell and Lake Mead are once again falling dangerously low, despite billions of dollars in federal financing and temporary drought measures that are expected to result in 3.7 million acre-feet of water conservation by the end of 2026.
Tina Shields, the manager of the Imperial Irrigation District’s water department, which receives the majority of California’s Colorado River water, noted that negotiating a deal is difficult enough. As the situation worsens, you will need to undertake much more work sooner rather than later. things makes things more difficult, but it doesn’t make it impossible.
In the upcoming year, it is anticipated that the reservoirs, which are currently only 31% full, will remain at levels that result in reductions of 18% for Arizona, 7% for Nevada, and 5% for Mexico.
Several scenarios for the next two years were offered by federal officials today. According to experts, this one probably indicates that Lake Powell may fall below the levels required to produce electricity by December 2026 if there is another dry year.
The issue is that as temperatures rise due to climate change, runoff is absorbed by thirsty soils before it reaches the river. Spring discharge into Lake Powell was just 41% of normal, despite the fact that precipitation in the upper basin this year reached 80% of average and the snowpack reached 92% of the median at the end of March.
The situation is very terrible, according to Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute, who spoke to CalMatters.
Even though there are whispers that things are not going so well, he remarked, “I’m still hopeful that we’re going to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute.”
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According to California negotiator Hamby, a new plan to give each basin a certain percentage of the river’s typical flow is now coming together under the Trump administration. According to the plan, Mexico and the lower basin would get an undetermined portion of the average flow, ranging from 55% to 75%.
What that proportion should be is the question that needs to be resolved by November.
According to Hamby, it would be an agreement for us to live with less than we would otherwise be entitled to. He went on to say that the states in the upper basin could need to take drastic measures, such as saving water.
With shortages averaging 1.3 million acre-feet annually, Becky Mitchell of Colorado stated that water users in the upper basin already cut back on their use during drier years.
According to her, the details will determine how to proceed with a plan.
According to an upcoming assessment, if existing policies aren’t changed, the reservoirs will probably approach deadpool—the point at which water can no longer be released—at least once in the ensuing decades.Benjamin Bass, a researcher at UCLA’s Center for Climate Science and the study’s primary author, told CalMatters that these reservoirs run the risk of sinking to lower water levels, which might render them unusable. That’s the main reason we need to change the current policy to a stricter one.
CalMatters is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news company that holds our officials accountable while providing Californians with articles that examine, clarify, and consider solutions to problems affecting their quality of life.
