John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and the state's lead Colorado River negotiator, was much more blunt. "I worry that we’re spending too much on initial Band-Aids and not enough on a sustainable future."
"It’s business as usual, but I guess we do have some money to spend," she says. Department of Interior, and currently Senior Water Policy Scholar at Colorado State University's Water Center.
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This includes the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $8.3 billion to address a number of issues nationwide, including water and drought challenges, plus $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act - signed into law today by President Biden.īut it was all "kind of anticlimactic" for Jennifer Gimbel, former deputy assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. In its announcement today, the Bureau of Reclamation touted recently passed legislation that it said will help the situation. The lake is at risk of dropping to what's known as "dead pool." At that point, not only would hydropower be impossible, but no water would flow downstream past Hoover Dam to users in Arizona and California - a true catastrophe. The towers on the left and right are two of four that take in water to drive the dam’s hydropower turbines. The turquoise waters of Lake Mead, with its “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits left behind as the reservoir has shriveled, stretch to the north in this panoramic image captured from the top Hoover Dam on June 29, 2022. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in all of 2021, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico used, in total - for cities, farms and industry - about 3.5 million acre-feet. Even so, that number doesn't come close to what Commissioner Touton had asked for back in June: basin-wide cuts of 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water. That is quite significant, and it follows on from major cuts made to Arizona's water deliveries during the current year. The reductions to be borne by Arizona and Nevada amount to 617,000 acre-feet of water. But California will see no cuts at all - at least not yet. Nevada will get an 8 percent reduction, and Mexico will see a reduction of 7 percent. As a result, Arizona will see a 21 percent cut in the water it ultimately gets from Lake Mead during 2023.
The bureau did declare what's known as a "Tier 2" shortage in the Lower Colorado River Basin. īut even though the seven basin states - Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California - missed Touton's deadline to agree on voluntary deep cuts, her agency did not respond as strongly as many water experts expected. Combined storage of the major reservoirs in the upper and lower portions of the Colorado River Basin sits at just 34 percent of capacity, down from 40 percent last year, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Reclamation.
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“The system is approaching a tipping point, and without action we cannot protect the system,” Touton said during a news conference today.Ĭurrently, Lake Powell is just 26 percent full, and Lake Mead is 27 percent full - both record lows. The deposits have been left behind as the lake has dropped to record low levels due to the worst megadrought in the region in 1,200 years, plus overuse of water. Lake Mead’s light-colored “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits towers nearly 180 feet above a speeding boat on June 29, 2022, near Hoover Dam.
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