Tuesday’s announcement by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that it would require Arizona and Nevada to reduce their annual allocation of water from the Colorado River came as no surprise to most water experts.
The reductions announced by Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton have been part of a long-standing agreement, known as the interim guidelines, since 2007.
Western states that rely on the Colorado River Basin for their water supplies face a Tuesday deadline to tell the Bureau of Reclamation how they plan to cut back during the crushing drought that has shrunk the river. But as that date nears, the consequences for failure remain a key unknown.
Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton announced in June that states in the Colorado River Basin need to propose how to conserve between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water before a mid-August deadline, when the agency releases its 24-month projections for water levels in lakes Powell and Mead.
With monsoon rains four out of the last five days in the Las Vegas area, there is at least one plus — Lake Mead has risen 3 inches.
At 7 p.m. Sunday the top of the lake was 1,040.99 feet above sea level at Hoover Dam. Five days ago, July 26, the lake measured at 1,040.75 feet.
The Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) issued a call last June to the public for assistance in developing long-term operations on the Colorado River. This announcement came within days of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton’s message to a Senate Committee that the seven states of the Colorado River Basin must come up with an emergency deal by mid-August to conserve between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water in the next year to protect the entire Colorado River system, according to the Family Farm Alliance (FFA) newsletter.
Rising river levels? It’s been a surprising sight in recent days for people out along the American River.
California is in year three of a severe drought and people are being asked to conserve, but water releases from Folsom Dam are being dramatically increased this week.
During a U.S. Senate hearing on Western drought earlier this week, the commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation told the states in the Colorado River Basin that they have 60 days to create an emergency plan to stop using between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water in the next year or the agency will use its emergency authority to make the cuts itself.
For context, the entire state of Arizona is allowed to use 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year.
While the current drought afflicting the Colorado River Basin is the worst since federal scientists began keeping records, a new study using paleoclimatic data discovers it is not the worst drought in the region’s recent geological history.
Researchers at the Bureau of Reclamation published the study Thursday in Geophysical Research Letters, a peer-reviewed geoscience journal.
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.
Even as most agricultural water supplies are being cut to the bone, with California descending into a third year of extreme drought, the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractor districts will apparently receive 650,000 acre feet — 100% of their “critical year” allotment.
The move is just one of the quirks in California’s byzantine world of water rights.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation has increased the amount of water coming out of the Friant Dam above Fresno to help satisfy its contract with the Exchange Contractors.
In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation built a dam that flooded a celebrated canyon on the Utah-Arizona border. Today, it’s known as Lake Powell — the second-largest reservoir in the U.S.
A half billion dollar tourism industry has grown in the desert around the reservoir but a decades-long megadrought is putting its future in question.
With what some call America’s ‘lost national park’ reemerging, an old debate is also resurfacing: should we restore a beloved canyon or refill a popular and critical reservoir?
