Lake Powell, one of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs, is at its highest level in more than three years. This even though 2024 runoff will be below average.
The lake is now 42% full, nearly 20% higher than it was last spring, and out of danger of falling so low it would hit a so-called dead pool and not be able to generate electricity at Glen Canyon Dam.
Longtime Arizona environmental reporter Tony Davis is covering the story for the Arizona Daily Star, and he joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: OK, start with some details here. Like, 42% full doesn’t really sound great, I’ve got to say, but it’s way up, it sounds like, from where we were just a year ago.
DAVIS: A year ago, it was as low as 23% full. And then in this winter and spring of 2023, there was this enormous amount of snow up in the upper basin. I mean, the Colorado Rockies and then the headwaters. So instead of the usual — we’ve been getting 50, 60, 80% of normal runoff — and last year was 166% of normal.
And then this year the runoff was only 84% of normal. But because there was a lot of water conservation that the lower basin states did: Arizona, California and Nevada between them agreed to save 1 million acre feet of water a year last year. And so they started the conservation this past year. And that pushed the lake up further even though the total runoff this year was below normal.
Then in June, the precipitation in the upper basin was 150% of normal, and that by itself pushed the lake up another four feet. So now it’s like 60 feet higher than it was a year ago. And that’s pretty amazing.
GILGER: So that is pretty amazing. So it sounds like we got some good weather here. We got some good luck, right? But we also can thank ourselves, in a way. You mentioned significant cutbacks from water users. Give us a little more detail on that. What did we all do?
DAVIS: Here in Tucson, the city agreed to leave something like 50,000 acre feet in Lake Mead in the past year. And this year, they’re going to leave 30,000 acre feet. And I know Phoenix was taking similar measures. And a lot of other cities in central Arizona also agreed to leave some water in Lake Mead, and they were all compensated for it.
There was hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the Bureau of Reclamation to compensate all these cities for giving up water. And of course, I don’t know how long they’re going to be able to come up with that kind of money, but that’s what’s working for now.
GILGER: Let’s just back up for a second and just get a sense of how unbelievable this is in a way. Last year at this time, we were talking about dead pool. We were worried that the levels in this lake would get so low that we could not even generate power. This is a huge shift.
DAVIS: Yeah, I guess I would say that right now it appears that the river’s runoff and the precipitation have become very, very volatile. Because the lake had dropped like 50 or 60 feet from 2021 to 2023. And now it went back up another 60 feet this past year, I should say. And that could happen again.
I mean, we’re not out of the woods. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be great because overall, the climate appears to be changing. And overall, over 20 years, the runoff is declining. This last year was really excellent. And if we could get weather like this every year, we wouldn’t have a problem. But there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen. And in fact that’s not what’s happened in the past.
GILGER: So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what this means going forward. We’re right now no longer in danger of dead pool, at least at this point. But does this also mean that we’re not as likely to see cutbacks in water deliveries of the reservoir? Are those conservation measures that you talked about in the major cities here, in Phoenix and Tucson, going to have to continue to keep this going?
DAVIS: Well, yeah. The three lower basin states have agreed to save 1 million acre feet a year for three years. And that, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, will keep the system whole until like 2026. And for the longer term, there’s going to have to be more conservation measures, or at least more plans to institute conservation measures if the lake keeps falling.
The idea is to have a system in place that can respond quickly when the runoff gets low again and both Lake Mead and Lake Powell start dropping. It wouldn’t be immediate cutbacks, but they’d have the system in place to do these cutbacks when they’re necessary. It would just be able to respond faster and have more flexibility.
GILGER: So long term we’re not really out of danger for good here because things are, as you say, so volatile.
DAVIS: That is correct.
GILGER: You’re also talking about the effects, though, on the lake. There’s economic impacts up at Lake Powell, like recreational activities are back up and running now that were not last summer because of this, right?
DAVIS: That is correct. Some of the marinas that shut down are now running again, although there’s still a number of them that are still shut down. There was a ferry that took people from the Halls Crossing Marina to the Bullfrog Marina at the east end of the lake. It was shut down for three years, but it reopened this month, although that was when the lake was at a like 3,583 feet. When it goes back below 3,575, they can’t keep it open. For right now though, it’s open.
GILGER: Let me ask you about forecasts for next year then. At least in the near term, it sounds like we’re out of some immediate danger — not long term, obviously. What does the forecast look like next year? Might this good trend continue?
DAVIS: The Bureau of Reclamation issues forecasts every month, and they look two years ahead. And the current forecast is for Lake Powell to go down in the fall and then next year to come back up. And it would actually be a little higher next year than it is now. But that assumes average precipitation and average runoff.
And a lot of years we don’t get average precipitation and average runoff. It could be a lot more or a lot less. And in fact, it’s almost never average. So I take those forecasts with a little bit of a grain of salt.
GILGER: Yeah, absolutely. Last question for you, Tony: Looking at this as a little piece of good water news, what would it take in terms of conservation — because we can’t control the weather — going forward to ensure that we get some more good news on Lake Powell and these major reservoirs in the future? What kind of cutbacks would we have to see?
DAVIS: Well, they have to be prepared to cut back at least as much as what we’ve already cut back so far. There’s a structural deficit on the river of using about 1.2 million acre feet a year more routinely than what’s actually there. And so they have to cut that back at a minimum. And then they’re probably going to end up having to cut back more if necessary.
It’s a matter of getting plans in place to be prepared. You hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And that’s what they’re trying to do.
