Over 40 Million People Rely On Water From The Colorado River. It’s Dangerously Close To Drying Up.

The Colorado River is in desperate need of a new management strategy because of decades of drought and increased population.

 Negotiations between seven states to reapportion the river’s water have been deadlocked for months, and the federal government is threatening to break the deadlock with its own management plan — whether the states like it or not.

The Department of the Interior gave Arizona, California and Nevada, New Mexico and Utah a deadline to come to an agreement twice. Each time, the states missed it and failed to reach consensus.

The federal government’s request is unprecedented in U.S. history. About 40 million Americans rely on the Colorado River for water. The Bureau of Reclamation asked the Basin States to reduce water consumption by around one-third.

On Wednesday, the latest deadline was met by six of seven states that agreed to a plan for reducing water consumption. California was the only exception. The Golden State presented its own plan, emphasizing its priority rights in relation to the Colorado River, which have been part of the legal framework that governs the basin for over a century.

A lack of consensus can increase the chances that the Bureau of Reclamation will develop its own plan and force basin states to follow it, whether or not they want it. In order to create a basin Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the bureau will need a plan. The EIS will inform the Department of the Interior’s long-term water management strategy.

For the past 100 year, the Colorado River has been managed under the same rough legal framework as water apportionment. It has been updated with new infrastructure and settled court cases. The basin’s law system is collectively called “The Law of the River.”

In 1922, an agreement known as the Colorado River Compact was the cornerstone of this legal framework. This agreement split the basin into two halves and provided water for each with 7.5 million acre feet. Mexico was granted 1.5 million acres of Colorado River water through the Mexican Water Treaty of 1944. One acre is the equivalent of three households using water in a year.

The upper basin, where the Colorado River originates, consists of parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and is above the river’s two reservoirs: Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam, and Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. The lower basin states – Arizona, California, and Nevada – are located roughly below the reservoirs and can pull from them, whereas the upper basin must rely on the river’s natural flow.

Colorado Foundation for Water Education

The 1922 agreement that established the apportionment of the upper and lower basins might have been too optimistic. The compact Estimate the Colorado River’s annual flows at 17 million acre-feet. Since then, the river averaged around 12 million acres per year. The compact, we now know, was drawn up during the river’s wettest season in the past 500 years, according to Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center.

The river is also under stress due to poor planning and rapid population growth. Study Published last year suggests that the West is the driest it’s been in 1,200 years.

“In the Colorado River Basin, the period from 2000 through 2021 has been the driest 22-year period recorded in more than 100 years of record-keeping,” Tanya Trujillo, an experienced water lawyer and Interior’s assistant secretary for Water and Science, Telled Congress in 2021 “The reservoir system was 95 percent full in 2000, but as of September 28th, Colorado River system reservoirs sit at just 39 percent, the lowest levels since they began to fill.”

The water level has continued to drop since Trujillo’s testimony. The strain is evident in the Colorado River basin’s two major reservoirs. Lakes Powell, Mead and Mead both have record lows. The drop in the water level of Lake Mead has led to a lot of headlines about Lake Mead over the last year. revealing Sunken ships, bodies and other objects that have been weighed down and sunk into the lake’s bottom.

Officials in seven states are concerned about what could happen when each reservoir approaches two levels of water. benchmarksEach of these would have serious consequences.

The minimum power pool elevation, which is the highest benchmark, refers to the lowest level at which the lake must sit to enable their dams produce hydropower.

Millions of Americans have access to power from the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. If that power is lost, it could have devastating consequences.