Alex Cardenas. J.B. Hamby. Jim Hanks. Javier Gonzalez. Norma Sierra Galindo.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of them. But with the Colorado River in crisis, they’re arguably five of the most powerful people in the American West.
The window to avoid even more painful cuts on the Colorado River just closed.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation is asking states to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water, just to keep Lake Powell and Lake Mead out of critically low territory in 2023.
And we’ll need a plan to do so by mid-August when shortage levels and other important operating details for the next water year are set.
A stubborn La Niña climate pattern in the tropical Pacific is likely to persist through the summer and may hang on into 2023, forecasters say.
La Niña has been implicated not only in the unrelenting drought in the U.S. Southwest, but also in drought and flooding in various parts of the world, including ongoing drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.
As California toils through a third consecutive drought year, many Sacramento Valley farmers, well known for supporting waterfowl that stop along the Pacific Flyway, are being left high and dry.
The farmers are facing water-supply challenges that are worse this season than in previous dry years.
“This drought is hitting Northern California really hard and in some unprecedented ways,” said Ellen Hanak, director of water policy for the Public Policy Institute of California, speaking last week on drought at a meeting of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture.
You’ve got a smartphone. Maybe a smart watch. Or even a smart doorbell.
In the coming months and years as California struggles with worsening droughts, millions of Bay Area residents will soon be getting a smart water meter.
The way the story goes, the one Fort Collins resident Aaron Million first told more than a decade ago, the whole thing started with one of those ah-ha moments, a split-second grasp of some sliver of grand opportunity.
Million, who in the mid-2000s, was pursuing a master’s degree in agriculture and resource economics at Colorado State University, was holed up in the library on a Sunday night. At some point, Million’s attention wandered to a collection of early 1900s Colorado state maps. Million fixated on a 41-mile stretch of the Green River that briefly swerves in and out of the Northwest corner of the state.
In my household we shower every few days. We don’t flush every time. After a dinner party, I empty my guests’ water glasses into the houseplants. It’s been four years since I lived through Cape Town’s water crisis, but hard-earned habits die hard. My water conservation routines may sound like too much information, or even borderline unhygienic, but as the threat of water scarcity looms large around the world, they may well be worth adopting.
As the West endures another year of unrelenting drought worsened by climate change, the Colorado River’s reservoirs have declined so low that major water cuts will be necessary next year to reduce risks of supplies reaching perilously low levels, a top federal water official said Tuesday.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said during a Senate hearing in Washington that federal officials now believe protecting “critical levels” at the country’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — will require much larger reductions in water deliveries.
(Editor’s Note: Sandra L. Kerl, general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, issued a statement on U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton’s testimony today before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the severity of the drought on the Colorado River and need for near- and long-term innovation and investment: https://www.waternewsnetwork.com/san-diego-county-water-authority-general-manager-issues-statement-on-colorado-river-conditions-and-sustainability/)
The governor of California stood in a patch of dry brown grass as he made his proclamation:
“We’re in a new era. The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day — that’s going to be a thing of the past,” he said. “We’re in a historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.”
But it wasn’t Gavin Newsom speaking — it was the state’s previous governor, Jerry Brown, and the year was 2015.
The Cruelest Summer Yet? California Is Facing Drought, Heat, Power Outages and Fires — All at Once
Even with the upheaval of the pandemic mostly behind us, the menace of drought and rising temperatures is threatening to derail the return to normal.
This year’s extraordinarily dry, warm weather, which is expected to continue in the coming months, is stoking fears of a multitude of problems: increasing water restrictions, extreme heat, power outages, wildfire and smoke — potentially all of the above in one vicious swoop.
