There weren’t any smiles coming from panelists while addressing attendees at the Colorado River Water User Association’s annual conference at Caesars Palace on Thursday. The depletion of water in the Colorado River Basin has water officials alarmed, and they shared the facts.
The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its reservoirs depleted and western states under pressure to drastically cut water use.
It’s a crisis that scientists have long warned was coming. Years before the current shortage, scientists repeatedly alerted public officials who manage water supplies that the chronic overuse of the river combined with the effects of climate change would likely drain the Colorado’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels.
You’d think that, given how dangerously low Lake Mead is getting, we’d have a good idea of what life might look like without that water.
Yet few major players are modeling for a future without Colorado River water – or even a future in which we are asked to live on markedly less of it.
Ironically, the deeper the lake plunges, the more reluctant water managers seem to be about fleshing out the worst-case scenario.
The Bureau of Reclamation selected 19 projects to receive $3.5 million in WaterSMART Applied Science Grants to develop tools and information that will inform and support water management decisions. These projects will be matched by more than $4.5 million, non-federal cost-match, supporting a total project cost of $8 million.
Water managers need the most updated information to ensure they are making the best water management decisions,” said Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman. “Applied Science Grants fund tool development and studies that help make western water more reliable.”
All of those dry January days have taken a toll on California’s snowpack, but officials say it’s too early to worry about drought conditions.
Surveyors with the California Department of Water Resources trekked through a snow-covered field Thursday at the department’s Phillips station, above Lake Tahoe, to take the second seasonal measurement that serves as an important marker for the state’s water supply.
Three years ago, water began seeping out of yards and pooling in roadways in the Sacramento Pocket neighborhood.
But the water wasn’t from a recent storm.
“It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks,” said Rick Johnson, executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency.
A fight over the management of a diked island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is shining a light on a growing conundrum for California water managers, farmers and environmentalists over the best way to restore natural habitat on cropland created more than a century ago by draining marshes.
The courtroom battle over 9,000-acre Staten Island is the latest conflict in the delta over farming, wetlands and the aging levees that, besides preventing flooding, preserve a way of life on the man-made islands.
With snowpack levels in the Sierra Nevada registering at 90% of normal Thursday and state reservoirs at record historic levels, the urban water supply picture for 2020 could hardly be any rosier.
Southern California water managers are trying to restrain their joy, not because of a picture-postcard mountain top, but for the bounty that will come in spring when the snow melts, sending pristine water into state reservoirs and more importantly, southward via the State Water Project aqueduct, a source that supplies 30% of Southern California’s drinking water.
A rather quiet gathering of those who control the most precious resource in the West happened on the Strip last week.
It was the annual Colorado River Water Users Association Conference.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
