Tag Archive for: Central Arizona Project

What Could Future Colorado River Water Cuts Look Like? States Look to This Year’s Weak Snowpack to Find Out.

If any of the Colorado River management options were used to manage this year’s sub-par snowpack, Arizona, California and Nevada would be forced to slash 17% to 43% of their legal share. Coloradans would be focused on voluntary conservation.

How City of Phoenix, CAP Are Addressing Water Supply Issues

Arizona, much like California and other states with large deserts, is having an issue with dwindling Colorado River water levels.

With so many people living in and moving to Arizona, specifically the Phoenix area, state and local agencies are working toward water solutions, including expanding the Bartlett Dam and adding new infrastructure.

Lake Mead Keeps Shrinking as States Struggle to Find Colorado River Cuts

Getting states to agree to use less water is hard. Doing so in a matter of months is near impossible.

The last time the Colorado River Basin agreed to a set of reductions to address drought conditions and dropping levels at Lake Mead was in 2019. Those reductions took five years to iron out and amounted to a fraction of what the federal government now says needs to be cut in order to keep the system from crashing.

A Showdown Over Colorado River Water is Setting the Stage for a High-Stakes Legal Battle

Months of bitter negotiations between seven states that rely on the Colorado River’s vanishing water have collapsed along a clear fault line over the past week: California versus everyone else.

The multi-state talks, which have been ongoing in fits and starts for months, were focused on achieving unprecedented water cuts to save the Colorado River – a system that provides water and electricity to more than 40 million people in the West.

In a Water Deficit, Arizona Contemplates a Future Without Colorado River Access

Water from the Colorado River covers more than a third of Arizona’s total water usage, but the state is increasingly losing access to that supply.

The state is no longer in what Terry Goddard, the president of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board of Directors, called “a fool’s paradise.” Arizona had maintined a surplus of water since the mid-1980s, but that’s not the case today. Now, it’s losing water, and it’s losing it fast.

Opinion: It’s Time for the Feds to Pull Rank and Enforce Already Agreed Water Cuts

The speeches at the Colorado River summit in Las Vegas last week ranged all the way from pessimistic to panicked. Ted Cooke, the outgoing director of the Central Arizona Project, summed it up: “(T)here’s a real possibility of an effective dead pool“ at Lake Mead, making it impossible to release water through Hoover Dam for downstream delivery to Arizona and California.

More Questions Than Answers at Colorado River Water Meetings

Key questions resurfaced Thursday at a conference of Colorado River water administrators and users from seven U.S. states, Native American tribes and Mexico who are served by the shrinking river stricken by drought and climate change. Who will bear the brunt of more water supply cuts, and how quickly?

Former Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman to Head Central Arizona Project

Former U.S. Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman will take over as general manager of the Central Arizona Project in the new year, one that promises to include pivotal interstate negotiations over conserving the Colorado River water that supplies the CAP canal. Burman led the Bureau of Reclamation during the Trump administration, a period in which the agency managing Colorado River water and dams helped broker a Drought Contingency Plan. In that plan, Arizona agreed to take less water from the system to prevent catastrophic losses later.

Where the Colorado River Crisis is Hitting Home

These days it can feel almost cliche to throw around the word “dystopian.” But it’s hard not to use it while standing on the narrow road crossing the Hoover Dam as tourists gawk at the hulking structure’s exposed columns that for decades were underwater.

The Colorado River is Drying Up — But Basin States Have ‘No Plan’ On How to Cut Water Use

One month after states missed a federal deadline to propose ways to drastically cut their use of water supplied by the Colorado River, water managers who met for a seminar in Grand Junction said they still didn’t have comprehensive solutions ready to help bolster the imperiled river system.

Water leaders, agricultural producers, environmentalists and others from across the drought-stricken river basin met Friday for the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar to discuss the historic-low levels in the river’s biggest reservoirs — and the need to cut back usage from Wyoming to California.

While the problems the basin faces were apparent in the day-long discussions about the state of the river, solutions were not.