How climate change sparked a multistate battle over the Colorado River, by KPaoletta
Photo: David McNew/Getty Images The Colorado River’s 1,450-mile run begins amid the snowy pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains and ends in the subtropical waters of the Gulf of California. Over the millions of years the river has been running this course, it has gradually carved through the Southwest’s crimson limestone and shale to create a succession of unimaginably vast canyons: Ruby, Cataract, Marble, and Grand. The writer Marc Reisner described the Colorado as the “American Nile.
The Southwest’s water managers have been working feverishly this spring just to prop up the system until formal negotiations can begin next winter. In March, the water level of Lake Powell declined below a threshold at which the Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate power becomes threatened, and the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees the West’s water infrastructure, is working with the states above Lake Powell to divert more water to keep its dam operational.
The fundamental flaw of this compact is that it was signed at a time of unprecedented rain and snowfall in the basin, which led its original framers to assume that 15 million acre-feet of water flowed through the Colorado every year. In the 21st century, the annual average flow has been closer to 12 million acre-feet, even as much more continues to be diverted from Lake Mead and Lake Powell every year — that discrepancy helps to explain how the reservoirs have emptied so quickly.
Although he arrived at Met during a time of plenty, within a year the agency was scrambling to respond to the worst water year ever recorded in the Southwest. In 2002, the Colorado shrank to just 3.8 million acre-feet — one-quarter of the flow assumed in the compact. “In 2003, we woke up and we lost half our water,” Hasencamp says. “We had to scramble.
But pipelines and dams are useful only as long as there’s water to be stored and transported. That’s why Cox released a video last summer in which he told his constituents that the state needed “some divine intervention” to solve its problems. “By praying collaboratively and collectively, asking God or whatever higher power you believe in for more rain, we may be able to escape the deadliest aspects of the continuing drought.
When I caught up with Entsminger a few days after the conference, he was matter-of-fact about the declaration. “The average of the last 20 years is 12.3 million acre-feet, right? If you’re saying from today to mid-century the average flow of the river only goes down another 10 percent, you’re lucky.” In some ways, Entsminger is an ideal messenger for this kind of reality check.
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