Arizona Preparing For The Inevitable: Mead At 38% Capacity, Powell At 45%, No End In Sight

[hatrack]

With reservoir levels falling along the Colorado River, Arizona’s top water officials say they are making progress in talks toward a set of agreements for cities, farmers and tribes to share in water cutbacks and join in a larger proposed deal to prevent Lake Mead from dropping even further.

Since July, state water managers have been leading a series of biweekly meetings to work out details of the proposed drought-contingency plan. After their latest three-hour session Thursday, the two officials leading the talks said they are optimistic about finalizing agreements within Arizona in November so that the Legislature can sign off in January.

The proposed three-state plan would involve California, Arizona and Nevada jointly taking less water out of Lake Mead to give the reservoir a boost. Based on Arizona’s priority system of water rights, complying with the plan without an additional adjustment would cut off water for farmers who depend on deliveries from the Central Arizona Project.

The idea is to reach an agreement that “more equitably spreads around the pain and the benefits” of the drought-contingency plan in Arizona, said Tom Buschatzke, director of the state Department of Water Resources.

EDIT

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2018/09/29/colorado-river-drought-talks-arizona-water-deal/1457516002/

[CrispyQ]

1. Seven billion miracles is enough.

I had that bumper sticker back when it was six billion.

[joshcryer]

2. Just to show how dire and dramatic Mead's water levels are:

http://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp

[CrispyQ]

3. That is stunning.

What are the chances it will ever hit 2013 levels again? The Colorado River is shrinking.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169/

snip...

Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland.

The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

Climate change will likely decrease the river’s flow by 5 to 20 percent in the next 40 years, says geoscientist Brad Udall, director of the University of Colorado Western Water Assessment. Less precipitation in the Rocky Mountains will yield less water to begin with. Droughts will last longer. Higher overall air temperatures will mean more water lost to evaporation. “You’re going to see earlier runoff and lower flows later in the year,” so water will be more scarce during the growing season, says Udall.

Even on this site I was told that Phoenix will be just fine because they know how to manage water.

[joshcryer]

4. More than certain, it rebounded *because* of the diversion efforts.

This article is talking about how now the baseline is going to be the norm and it's only going to get worse.

Imagine the Vegas and California and Arizona metro areas without power from the Hoover and Glenn Canyon dams...

Look at Lake Powell: http://powell.uslakes.info/level.asp

They have to release water from Powell to fill Lake Mead.