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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Chuck Cullom is used to responding to myriad challenges that arise on the Colorado River. But this summer problems on the drought-stressed river are piling up at a dizzying pace: Reservoirs plummeting to record low levels, question of whether Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam can continue to release water and produce hydropower and unprecedented water cuts. As executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, Cullom brings an unusual perspective to the growing list of challenges. Cullom spent the last two decades viewing issues on the river through a Lower Basin lens, managing drought strategies and mitigation plans for the Central Arizona Project. Now, in his first year at the commission, Cullom has the chance to use his dual-basin perspective to help the seven states and 30 federally recognized tribes hash out ways to address the river’s issues.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
