For the second year in a row, Arizona and Nevada will face cuts in the amount of water they can draw from the Colorado River as the West endures an extreme drought, federal officials announced Tuesday. California has avoided cutbacks for now.
For the second year in a row, Arizona and Nevada will face cuts in the amount of water they can draw from the Colorado River as the West endures more drought, federal officials announced Tuesday.
The cuts planned for next year will force states to make critical decisions about where to reduce consumption and whether to prioritize growing cities or agricultural areas. Mexico will also face cuts.
Aug. 16, 2022 – Sandra L. Kerl, general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, issued the following statement in response to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-month projection for water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
“Today’s announcement by the Bureau of Reclamation is a reminder of just how important it is to increase water conservation across San Diego County and the rest of the arid West. An increasingly hot and dry climate is creating unprecedented challenges for water supplies that will impact life in the Southwest for the foreseeable future.
“The San Diego County Water Authority continues to participate in discussions about the future of the Colorado River. We also continue to highlight the value of the conserved water transfer agreement between the Water Authority and the Imperial Irrigation District, the cornerstone of the landmark Quantification Settlement Agreement, or QSA, negotiated in 2003, as well as our investments in concrete lining sections of the All-American and Coachella Canals to conserve water previously lost to seepage. Through the QSA, the Water Authority funds critical conservation efforts in the Imperial Valley that provide the San Diego County region 277,700 acre-feet of highly reliable, cost-effective conserved water supplies each year. Further, the QSA enables California to live within its historic 4.4-million-acre-foot annual Colorado River apportionment while providing a roadmap for current efforts to balance the complex economic, agriculture, environmental, most notably the Salton Sea, and water-use needs in the Colorado River Basin.
“The Water Authority has not been asked to make any voluntary reductions to Colorado River water supplied by IID under Reclamation’s call for additional basin-wide conservation. If cuts were deemed mandatory to IID through an official Secretarial declared shortage to Priority 3 water in California, the Water Authority would take a pro-rata reduction of its IID transfer supplies.
“Investments by San Diego County residents in other water sources and storage facilities will continue to shield the region from the worst effects of the drought. At the same time, the potential for mandated water-use reductions should inspire every San Diegan to decrease their water use, for instance, by taking shorter showers, reducing irrigation of decorative grass, and upgrading to efficient appliances.”
— Sandra L. Kerl, General Manager, San Diego County Water Authority
About 300 miles southwest of San Antonio, water taps have run dry in a major Mexico city.
Thousands of residents wake up at dawn to check their taps and fill up containers. Others line up with large jugs, bottles and buckets at cisterns around the city, where fights have broken out when people try to jump the line.
It takes a lot of water to make power.
From spinning turbines to hydraulic fracturing to refining fuel, the flow of water is critical to the flow of electrons and heat. About 40 percent of water withdrawals — water taken out of groundwater or surface sources — in the United States go toward energy production. The large majority of that share is used to cool power plants. In turn, it requires energy to extract, purify, transport, and deliver water.
The federal government this week will announce the drought forecast for the arid Colorado River Basin, as well as possible cuts western states must make to conserve more water from a supply serving roughly 40 million people.
The Bureau of Reclamation Tuesday will issue its projection for conditions over the next two years in the West’s most important water supply—and the news is expected to be bleak.
Two months ago, federal officials took the unprecedented step of telling the seven states that depend on Colorado River water to prepare for emergency cuts next year to prevent reservoirs from dropping to dangerously low levels.
The states and managers of affected water agencies were told to come up with plans to reduce water use drastically, by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, by mid-August.
A team led by Kristen Guirguis, a climate researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, found evidence that the risk of hazardous weather is increasing in the Southwest.
The researchers investigated the daily relationships among four major modes of weather affecting California. How they interact governs the formation of weather events such as atmospheric rivers capable of bringing torrential rains and Santa Ana winds that can spread devastating wildfires.
“This study suggests that weather patterns are changing in a way that enhances hot, dry Santa Ana winds, while reducing precipitation frequency in the Southwest,” said Guirguis. “These changes in atmospheric circulation are raising the risk of wildfires during California winters.”
If you choose to design, implement and maintain a new WaterSmart landscape yourself, you can follow the Homeowner’s Guide to a WaterSmart Landscape to help you plan, prepare, and work through each step. Free classes and online videos can help.
Heavy monsoon rains have helped to relieve the Southwest’s historic drought, but water officials say the deluge isn’t enough to reverse a drying trend that has depleted the region’s primary water sources.
Much of the West remains entrenched in a 23-year “historically unprecedented” drought driven by climate change, said Jonathan Deason, an environmental engineering professor at George Washington University.
“It’s going to take about three years of above-average rainfall to have substantial recovery,” he said.
