Last week water officials from Nevada and two other Colorado River states said they would reduce their draws from the ailing waterway.
Now they need to make that happen.
Water leaders in Nevada, Arizona, and California signed an agreement to voluntarily reduce their take from the Colorado River to help stave off mandatory cuts in the upcoming years.
California is taking steps toward a 2024 start of construction on the 1.5-million-acre-feet Sites Reservoir thanks to new funding.
The California Water Commission in December determined the Sites Reservoir, located on the west side of the Sacramento Valley, is eligible for funding through the state’s 2014 voter-approved Proposition 1 Water Storage Investment Program, thereby opening access to $800 million, about 20% of the project’s $3.93 billion price tag.
The Arizona Diamondbacks ripped out the grass at Chase Field ahead of the 2019 season, replacing it with synthetic grass. It was a business decision, but it also ended up being a water-conservation measure.
The Phoenix-based major league baseball team thought it would save 2 million gallons a year. In the first season, the savings were closer to 4.5 million gallons, which is roughly the annual water usage of 49 households in the Phoenix area, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
“This challenge has been approaching for years and has been on our radar,” said Diamondbacks President and CEO Derrick Hall, whose team has saved 16 million gallons of water since the turf was installed. “We have tremendous relationships with the state’s legislators and executives, and have had discussions about water for years.”
The takeaway from the “500-plus plan,” the recently inked effort to save Lake Mead, can be summed up in just three words:
We’re. Not. Done.
That doesn’t make the deal any less consequential.
Like a sinister specter that won’t vanish, drought was already writing the playbook for water supplies in Utah and the rest of the West as early as fall of 2020.
The year 2021 may have been months ahead, but extremely dry conditions during those last few months of 2020 amplified the reality of what was to come: drought, and a nasty one.v
A federal plan to spend $210 million on water conservation programs includes $40 million for “conserving 500,000+ acre-feet of water over the next two years to stabilize the decline of Lake Mead.”
The plan also includes $10 million for efforts to suppress wildfires in the West.
John Entsminger walks a fine line as Southern Nevada’s top water official.
On one side, he has to explain the seriousness of a shrinking Colorado River to climate change skeptics and people who are content with not immediately handling the West’s water woes. On the other, he has to quell concerns of crisis on a river that supplies water to 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico.
A Southern Nevada water board approved a pair of resolutions Monday that seek to scale back future water consumption to accommodate population growth over the next several decades.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority board of directors approved one resolution to ban the installation of grass in new developments and another that supports a moratorium on the use of thirsty cooling units for new buildings.
Droughtsville, California, is in trouble.
Its water supply is endangered as multiple crises intensify: worsening droughts, competition for scarce supplies, sea level rise, groundwater contamination, earthquakes, wildfires and extreme weather. All of these factors, and more, threaten Droughtville’s ability to provide clean water to its residents.
The city is fictional, but the threats are not.
In the San Joaquin Valley, water is becoming a commodity equal to life and death.
California is a powerhouse of food production, growing some 40 percent of the country’s fruit, vegetables and nuts. However, the agriculture industry depends on a water supply that’s increasingly fragile and unreliable as the climate warms. As a means to increase access to livable drinking water, community and elected leaders alike are rallying behind “Building More Dams.” But this is simply not a viable solution.
