A water crisis is looming in the West as seven states struggle to agree on how to divide\u00a0water from the mighty Colorado River.
\nThe news keeps swirling: California plays\u00a0hardball with its neighbor states,\u00a0draconian cuts like lawn bans could be coming and massive reservoirs approach the dreaded\u00a0“dead pool.”
\nThe monthslong effort got more complex this week when California rejected a plan the other six states had put together, tossing an already contentious process into disarray.
\nThis all matters because the river provides a significant amount of the water that makes life in the West possible. From\u00a0Denver to Los Angeles, more than 40 million people depend on it to keep their farms flourishing and taps flowing.
\nWith a\u00a023-year drought\u00a0that’s brought river levels to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, how to reapportion that water has reached a crisis level.
\nWhat to know about the West\u2019s brewing\u00a0water war:
\nWhat’s the Colorado River Compact?
\nIn 1922, the\u00a0Colorado River Compact\u00a0was signed by seven Western states to\u00a0portion out\u00a0water from the river.
\nWho got how much water was based \u2013 after decades of legal wrangling \u2013 on who was using the most\u00a0back when the compact was decided. It’s basically a “first dibs” system,\u00a0 states that were using the most water in the 1910s\u00a0got the biggest share.
\nThose percentages haven’t changed in a century, but the populations of the states and the amount of water to go around has \u2014 drastically.
\nTwo facts have long complicated the West’s water problems. First, populations have soared in drought-stricken regions that depend on the river for water. And second, agriculture currently accounts for most of the water usage from the Colorado River \u2014 about 80%.
\nWhat’s the deadline for Colorado River Compact negotiations?
\nThe river’s flow has been falling for years, partly due to overuse and partly due to warming weather and increased drought\u00a0driven by climate change. It\u2019s estimated 40% of the severity of the current drought is attributable to\u00a0human-caused climate trends.
\nLast summer the Bureau of Reclamation asked the seven states to come up with a plan to reduce their use of the river’s flow by 2 to 4 million acre-feet a year. They were supposed to do that in 60 days. The request was repeated in December.
\nAUGUST:Taps have run dry in a major Mexico city for months. A similar water crisis looms in the US, experts say.
\nAn acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre with water one foot deep. It’s about 326,000 gallons of water. The\u00a0average California household\u00a0uses between one-half to one acre-foot of water a year.
\nFinally, the bureau said that if the states didn’t put together a plan by Jan. 31, it would come up with one on its own.
\nWhat did California do to complicate the process?
\nOn Monday\u00a0all the states but California submitted a\u00a0plan\u00a0suggesting overall decreases. It took into account evaporation along the water’s flow, which meant California’s water allowance would have taken a big cut.
\nCalifornia then launched a bombshell \u2013 it\u00a0rejected\u00a0the plan and instead said it has senior water rights. It\u00a0proposed some cuts, mainly targeting\u00a0states with fewer legal rights to the water, but\u00a0aimed\u00a0to preserve the majority of its more than century-old water rights.
\nWhile the state as a whole gets only about 15% of its water from the Colorado, that water is one-third of\u00a0what’s used by southern California, home to 23 million people.
\nWith no consensus, the Bureau of Reclamation will now begin to review alternatives.
\nWhat’s ‘dead pool’?
\nA big concern has been the drastically falling levels at two of the West’s biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell and\u00a0Lake Mead, which have fallen to one-third their capacity. The fear is that they could hit what’s known as “dead pool,” with catastrophic consequences.
\nMore:At Lake Powell, a ‘front row seat’ to a drying Colorado River
\nMore:Human remains discovered in Lake Mead for fourth time as drought causes shoreline to retreat
\n“Dead pool” is the level at which the water behind either the Hoover or Glen Canyon dam\u00a0is too low to flow out, halting downstream flows. Water managers worry that could happen within two years.
\nThere’s another number to worry about: the “inactive” pool, which is when there’s still water flowing out of the dams but not enough to generate hydroelectricity.
\nElectric power produced by the two dams is an important part of the nation’s energy supply. Lake Powell’s\u00a0eight generators\u00a0supply electricity to seven western states, and Lake Mead’s\u00a017 turbines\u00a0generate about four billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectric power annually.
\nWhy is there a water crisis?
\nThe Colorado River doesn’t have enough water for everyone who wants it and probably never did.
\nThe original Compact agreement was based on average river flows of 17.5 million acre-feet. The average is actually about 15 million acre-feet. Since 2000 that’s fallen to\u00a0about 12 million acre-feet.
\n“The demand on the water supply is so much greater than it used to be and so you have two trains barreling down at each other on the same track: climate change and population growth,” said former NASA scientist Tom Painter, who now runs a service that tracks snowfall and runoff.
\n“The population growth, that alone, independent of climate change, is a huge issue,” he said. “We have much greater pressure on every molecule of water supply.”<\/p>\n
Usatoday<\/p>\n
Tags\uff1awater crisis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A water crisis is looming in the West as seven states struggle to agree on how to divide\u00a0water from the mighty Colorado River. The news keeps swirling: California plays\u00a0hardball with its neighbor states,\u00a0draconian cuts like lawn bans could be coming and massive reservoirs approach the dreaded\u00a0“dead pool.” The monthslong effort got more complex this week […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5019,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1152],"tags":[2210,2211,1684],"class_list":["post-5143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanrights","tag-dead","tag-pool","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5143"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9755,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5143\/revisions\/9755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}