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.
It’s a picture-perfect day in Southern California. The sun is beating down on this Carlsbad beach, where volleyballs hit the sand and surfers paddle out into the waves. Just steps from here, the salty water lapping the shore is being transformed.
This beach neighbors the largest desalination facility in the Western Hemisphere. The Carlsbad Desalination Plant uses a complex web of pipes, tanks and specialized filters to pull salt and impurities out of ocean water, turning it into part of the drinking supply for San Diego County.
Water managers are feeling the crunch of a supply-demand imbalance along the Colorado River. Fresh water reserves are shrinking as climate change squeezes the river that supplies 40 million people and fields of crops across seven states. Some have proposed desalination technology as a way to augment that supply, easing the strain on a river that supplies a growing population from Wyoming to Mexico. Experts say it could be part of the solution, but likely won’t make much of a dent in the region’s water crisis.
At the Carlsbad plant, former seawater poured into a cup from a freshwater spigot. Michelle Peters, technical and compliance manager for plant operator Poseidon Water, held it and took a drink.
“At 10 a.m, the morning surfers were swimming in it off the coast in the ocean here,” she said. “Now it’s high-quality drinking water, ready for consumption.”
The megadrought California is enduring right now is the worst in more than a millennium.
In the last two decades, we have only sporadically not been in a state of drought, and the first three months of 2022 were the driest on record. Now, nearly every inch of California is experiencing severe or extreme drought, or even worse: A thick, donut-shaped ring in the Central Valley is in an exceptional drought — the highest drought designation the U.S. Drought Monitor gives.
On a ridge overlooking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it would have been possible to see the first flickering flames of the Oak Fire and then how it engulfed its surroundings.
It took just 24 hours to mushroom to 10,000 acres and become California’s biggest wildfire this year.
“That’s crazy fast,” said Joe Amador, one of thousands of firefighters from across the state now deployed to fight the blaze.
Here’s a look at the status of California’s reservoirs during another drought:
There has not been much good news about California’s water supply lately, but there could be some relief on the way. The North-of-Delta Offstream Storage project, often referred to as the planned Sites Reservoir, was authorized by Congress in 2003. The long delayed project got a financial boost in March when the federal government signaled its intent to loan the project nearly $2.2 billion — about half of the cost to design, plan and build it.
California has experienced some of the driest months in our state’s history. Currently scientists say that we’re experiencing the worst megadrought in the last 1200 years. That prompted Governor Newsom to order new emergency water rules and cutbacks. But San Diego has been leaning into conservation for some time and we are uniquely positioned to weather these water supply-related woes. San Diegans know how to conserve water, but there is always more we can do.
With a megadrought draining water reserves in the West, states are looking for alternatives to handle water rights, many of which were set more than 100 years ago when water supplies were far more abundant.
Back then, just posting a sign next to a water diversion was enough to be considered a right, one which could still be honored now. But the climate crisis is now straining those rights. There just isn’t enough water in California to satisfy what’s been allotted on paper.
The Great Salt Lake has hit a new historic low for the second time in less than a year, a dire milestone as the US west continues to weather a historic mega-drought.
The Utah department of natural resources said in a news release on Monday that the Great Salt Lake dipped over the weekend to 4,190.1ft (1,277.1 meters).
Droughts are periods characterized by abnormally dry conditions. But what are megadroughts, and how bad is the one currently affecting parts of the United States?
While there are no clear definitions of what a megadrought is, in general these events are defined as droughts that last for multiple decades, i.e. two or more, according to Ashok Mishra, a professor in the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering at Clemson University.
Farmers in Imperial County feel like they’ve borne the “lion’s share” of cutbacks in use of water from the Colorado River as the megadrought gripping the West the last couple of decades continues to diminish that vital resource for the Southwest.
With elevations of the river’s reservoirs having now fallen to the point that significant additional cuts to the water supplied to the states that rely on the river are a grim likelihood next year, the Imperial Valley farmers are resigned to seeing further cuts in their water delivery. But they fear those cuts will adversely impact their farms, their lifestyle, their businesses and their communities.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
