Lake Powell, a vital reservoir, plunges toward unprecidented low levels as water crisis deepens in US west | Colorado river crisis

Lake Powell, the second-largest U.S. reservoir, is in danger of falling to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically dismal snowpack failed to raise water levels, scientists and water experts said, adding renewed urgency to stalling talks on how to protect a water source on which tens of millions of people in the U.S. Southwest depend.

The 185-mile-long Colorado River reservoir is currently at about 23% of its capacity, or roughly 5.6 acre-feet. Lake Powell fell below that level for several months three years ago. However, these levels in 2023 were recorded during the winter months, when the reservoir located on the Utah-Arizona border reached its lowest level. A runoff in the spring pushed the level to 9.6 million acre-feet by June, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Not this year. After a winter with historically low mountain snowpack and a record-breaking heat wave in the Southwest in March, water levels in Lake Powell have barely risen this spring. Even after additional releases upstream from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, it finished June below the previous month’s annual low and may continue to fall. Except for a few months in 2023, Lake Powell’s water level hasn’t been this low since June 1965; It’s two years after U.S. officials first began filling the lake.

“The unique thing about this year is there was no recovery,” said Jack Schmidt, director of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Research. “What we expect to happen is for Lake Powell to go into unprecedented low conditions this fall.”

“Water management in the Colorado River system is becoming extremely complex,” he added.

With the passing of the spring season, the water level of the lake is expected to continue to decrease for the next eight months. The consequences can be far-reaching – It jeopardizes hydroelectric power and adds further uncertainty to already contentious negotiations over how to share an increasingly unreliable water supply used by 40 million people in seven states, dozens of tribal nations and two countries.

Lake Powell is only 10 meters above the level where electricity-producing turbines begin to fail. According to Inc.. Approximately 6 million households and businesses rely on electricity produced by Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon power plant.

For more than two decades, the capacity of Lake Powell and its downstream sibling, Lake Mead, has declined even as the tens of millions of people who rely on them for fresh water have reduced their use. Negotiators from seven U.S. states with legal rights to water from the Colorado River — California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — have so far been unable to reach an agreement on how to protect the region’s most important surface water source. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could resolve this impasse by implementing its own cutback plan. as soon as next month.

Experts say the system is heading toward a long-feared breaking point as the climate in the western United States warms and dries.

“The root cause of the problem in the 21st century is the decline of runoff,” Schmidt said. “There’s less water in the system. That’s because the climate is warming, period.”

Increasingly bold solutions are needed

Facing increasingly serious challenges, many southwestern cities are taking increasingly bold steps to secure alternative water sources for the future, said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Water Policy Center at Arizona State University.

“Cities have a lot of tools to use,” Porter said. “As cities will be affected differently by the Colorado River shortage, they have developed a voluntary framework to help each other.”

Phoenix is ​​one of the most prominent cities where users can no longer rely on the Colorado River to meet the needs of their residents or to replenish depleted groundwater. Like other cities built on the hesitant idea that the Colorado River could provide a sustainable water source, Phoenix is ​​now turning to more creative solutions; The most important thing is to invest in recycling. wastewater from sewage We are back to drinking water.

In a similarly off-the-shelf solution, the city of San Diego announced a plan Last month it was to use excess water from the desalination plant to strike a water agreement with Arizona and Nevada. The deal, which has not yet been finalized, would allow those arid states to purchase some of San Diego’s unused water rights on the Colorado River.

Paying users to opt out of the system is exactly what the reservoirs need if officials hope to refill them, said Brad Udall, a scientist who studies water and climate research at Colorado State University.

“There are too many straws in the glass,” Udall said. “Instead of fighting every year over who gets what, let’s raise some straws… One way to do it is the American way; let’s buy them.”

Udall said the Colorado River crisis is perhaps the first event in which climate change has “forced us to rethink 100 years of law and policy, rules, interstate agreements and international agreements regarding a water resource.”

“You see the effects of climate change like major floods and hurricanes around the world, but people are picking up the pieces and kind of going back to the life they had before,” Udall said. “But we’re going to have to start buying out or cutting off water users because flows are so low here, and the rules we have are completely inadequate for the task.”

The gloomiest predictions have raised fears that current falling levels could condemn Lake Powell to a “death pool,” a situation in which the reservoir has become so low that gravity can no longer move water downstream.

But Schmidt, the Utah State University professor, said such a disaster is unlikely. Authorities would intervene to prevent this from happening through a combination of forced cuts and releases from the Flaming Gorge.

Still, experts expect Lakes Powell and Mead to remain largely depleted for the foreseeable future, even as they provide less water to residents.

“We are in control of how bad it gets,” said Porter, an Arizona water law expert. “But the only thing we can do to prevent it from getting worse is to remove less water.”