The Colorado is the largest river in the American Southwest and fills the region’s two most important water reservoirs: the Mead and Powell reservoirs. Not only does it draw drinking water for seven states and part of Mexico, the river is also vital for agriculture and energy supply. The drought and mismanagement of the past decades have meanwhile caused the river to thin out considerably.
The NASA Earth Observatory recently published satellite images that show the dramatic development over the past 22 years. This is probably the first major consequence of the climate crisis, “which the country literally cannot ignore,” writes the US news portal Grid News. “The so-called millennium drought, now in its 23rd year, has so dramatically reduced precipitation and snow runoff into rivers and lakes that a huge swath of the country is now at risk of a veritable water catastrophe.”
In 2000, Lake Mead and Lake Powell were regarding 95 percent full. Lake Mead is now approaching 27 percent, and Powell Reservoir is around 22 percent, according to US online magazine The Hill. Soon there will not be enough water to optimally operate the Hoover Dam turbines, which produce electricity.
austerity measures initiated
On the shore of adjacent Lake Mead, clearly visible signs have now formed, which local residents call “bathtub ring”. The deposits on the rock walls show where the water once stood. The dried up patches have revealed relics over the past few years, including cars falling off cliffs and even bodies being “disposed of” in barrels, CNN reported.
The drought has already led to major austerity measures, and the federal agency Bureau of Reclamation instructed the seven affected US states to draw up a water reduction plan. Next year, at least 2,500 million cubic meters less water should be used. And stricter cuts might come. If Lake Mead’s water levels stay that way, it would legally trigger a new level of restrictions in Arizona, Nevada, Mexico and likely California by the turn of the year.
John C. Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at the University of Utah, doubts whether that will be enough. In the journal Science, Schmidt and his colleagues modeled various scenarios for reducing consumption. They noted that the kind of restrictions needed to stabilize the river and reservoirs “may seem unthinkable.” Nevertheless, these changes are necessary and urgent. In addition to drastic water savings, the researchers are in favor of combining storage in the two reservoirs in a new way. The many intergovernmental and international agreements on the use of the river – some of which are a hundred years old – would also have to be renegotiated.
Full pools, empty reservoirs
Because there are many indications that the current state of the river can also be traced back to past management errors. “It’s a crisis that has unfolded over a long period of time,” Grid News quoted John Fleck, a professor at the University of New Mexico.
“We overloaded the river a century ago, then a whole bunch of communities made good faith decisions to build cities and farms in the desert,” Fleck said. The contracts were signed during a very humid climatic period, believing that the water would remain usable forever. “And climate change has only made this problem worse.”
Environmental organizations have been drawing attention to the drying up of the Colorado River for years and calling on politicians to take action. However, the general political climate is causing difficulties, with US President Joe Biden’s climate agenda faltering in Congress. In June, the Supreme Court also drastically restricted the government’s room for manoeuvre. There is a need for urgency.
Author Jonathan P. Thompson wrote on The Land Desk platform that this challenge “cannot be met with machines or technology or billions of dollars. The only way out is restriction, but it may already be too late for that”.
