It’s dry out there. Really dry. The last time it rained in Phoenix was Aug. 22. That was 145 days ago, which means we are in the third longest dry streak in our city’s history. The National Weather Service says a few more weeks and we’ll break the record.
And it’s not just Phoenix. Across Maricopa County, we’re seeing severe to extreme drought.
But, Cynthia Campbell, water resources management advisor for the City of Phoenix, says when it comes to our city’s water supply, it doesn’t really matter — at least not yet.
Campbell said while one dry winter isn’t dire for our city’s water supply, but a few more and we could be looking at a big problem. And it's today's Deep Dive.
Full conversation
CYNTHIA CAMPBELL: In the short term, it’s not really that enormous of an effect because our water comes primarily from surface flows, from the White Mountains and the Mogollon Rim, as well as the Colorado River. And in both instances, those are bounded by reservoirs
And reservoirs are designed for this purpose, right? When you have dry parts of time, then you pull on the reservoir a little more. And when you have wet times, you capture the excess in the reservoir to wait for the times when it’s drier.
So in the short term, our system — especially our local system run by SRP — is operating quite well, and our reservoirs are in good condition. And so when you go through these kind of prolonged times of no rain, yes, it impacts the reservoir, but you won’t see that impact maybe immediately.
It really only starts to show up in a meaningful way when you get very prolonged dry periods, and then you start looking about, well what about next year? That kind of thing.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so we’re in a situation now where we had a couple of wet winters and springs ahead of this — the last, I think, two years where we got lucky. We got a lot of rain. And that has not happened this year, but you’re saying it would need to happen again and again and maybe again before we’d really see much impact?
CAMPBELL: Well, it might not take that many times of dryness. Even this year, if we really don’t get any more precipitation or really — and and and for us also, it’s not just whether it rains in Phoenix. In fact, it matters very little whether it rains in Phoenix. What really matters is whether it snows in the White Mountains, if it snows on the Rim.
Those are our watersheds. That’s where the water really comes from. But if it doesn’t snow in those places and we get through the winter through March and we don’t have measurable precipitation in those areas, yeah, there will be implications for that for the reservoirs because it’s gonna push those reservoirs down as we go through the summer and we draw on them because that’s when we use more water is when it gets hot.
If that all happens, if we come around to the fall and next winter, then the reservoirs are gonna be lower, and we’re gonna be more critically looking to what’s the precipitation next winter.
GILGER: So one year out, it’s looking, it could affect.
CAMPBELL: It could have an impact one year out, but we’re not at that point yet in the winter where we have to say, “Oh this winter’s already shot.”
GILGER: OK, so let’s say that happens. Let’s say next winter is dry too. It very well could be. What do we do? What are our backup supplies?
CAMPBELL: I’m really glad you asked that question. One of the things about the way that the Salt River Project operates the reservoirs in this part of Arizona is that they use a process that they call conjunctive management.
So basically they have this surface water that sits in these reservoirs, but they also rely upon groundwater that is beneath our feet here in the Phoenix metro area. And so they have the ability to pull groundwater.
And SRP has a very elaborate plan that as to when the reservoirs go low, they basically turn on the multiple wells that they’ve got throughout that part of the Valley, and they start pulling groundwater a little more than they would in years when the reservoirs are full. and that way they can kind of balance out the two.
And if that happens next winter or the winter after, there is a plan. If it was really something that went on long long term and we really draw those reservoirs down over the long term, yeah, it gets to be problematic.
The other challenge that presents itself when we start driving our local reservoirs down is for many cities like Phoenix, we have what we call our alternate supplies stored in those reservoirs as well. This is water that can be used anywhere in the city of Phoenix, and it’s water that we intend to use when — not if — when we face Colorado River shortage beginning potentially as early as January of 2027.
GILGER: And we can pretty much count on getting some cuts to our Colorado River supply as the deals that should be crafted soon are are going to be hammered out here. Like, we should expect cuts.
CAMPBELL: Without a doubt.
GILGER: OK, so you just outlined a whole lot of backup systems we have — and backup systems for the backup systems — because we are a desert city, and the people who planned water here have been planning it that way for a long time.
But there has to be sort of an endpoint, I wonder, and what does that look like? Because we are facing a drier and warmer future, and we’re facing unprecedented growth. We’re still one of the fastest growing places in the country, more and more people coming here. How do we balance these things?
CAMPBELL: So we balance them by by using greater water efficiency. And water efficiency can mean a couple different things.
So for example, if you’re still using water to wash your driveway or to spray your sidewalks, that’s really probably not the best use of water. If you’re using water in a way where you’re overwatering your desert xeriscape, or maybe you’re watering grass that really doesn’t have a particular purpose.
On the other side of the scale and industrial processes, what we’re starting to see a lot more is that industrial customers are using and recycling water as they use it.
So they’ll use it in whatever their process is, but they’ll build their own plants, and they actually recycle it on site and use it over again. So the ultimate net use of water is less, that’s helpful.
And of course, Phoenix is very actively working toward advanced water purification where we are actually recycling our own water use in terms of our domestic water use. Our wastewater can be turned back into drinking water through a process of advanced water purification.

GILGER: I wonder — because this is the question that inevitably comes up when you have this conversation with people about the Phoenix’s water future — there’s an assumption that there’s no way this city can sustain itself going forward. I think you’ve probably heard plenty of that.
But there is also an assumption that at some point we’ll all be asked to conserve water in the way that you just kind of talked about, but maybe in more severe ways, where we’re seeing what we saw in California where people are being told you can only water your lawn these times or this often, or you shouldn’t have one. You have to get rid of it.
When do those kinds of mandatory kind conservation requirements come into play, or do they in your mind?
CAMPBELL: Well, absolutely they could come into play. You’ve offered another example of what I would put under the very broad category of water efficiency.
What we would like to see happen is that if we can educate people and familiarize them with ways that they can use water more efficiently, that they would do that on a voluntary basis. The reason being is because when you’re doing it voluntarily, when you make a choice to do something a certain way, then it kind of sticks with you. You adopt that practice, you adopt that type of use.
And in doing that, that kind of feeds into what we’ve always called in Phoenix a culture of conservation, right? People need to think about water all the time and try to make their own adjustments in ways that make their water use more efficient.
If we have to get to the point where we start talking about mandatory or non-voluntary ways to conserve water, that’s certainly something that we can contemplate. That’s something we’ve seen done, obviously in other places in the country.
The problem sometimes with that, though, is that for many people — and we’ve seen this play out in California — for many people, they look at those kinds of things that are mandatory and they say to themselves, “Well, you must be imposing this on me because it’s an emergency. When is the emergency over?”
And they’re looking for the end date. They’re looking for the time when they can “go back to the way they used to do things.” And what we’re saying is is that we would much rather people come to the conclusion that, “Hey, look, it’s gonna benefit me, it’s gonna benefit my neighbors, it’s going to benefit my community if I act like I live in the Sonoran Desert and I start using water in a more efficient way.”
GILGER: Do you think we do that here? I know you’ve talked before about how Phoenix has gotten a lot better over the last couple of decades and using less water. But I wonder, is that message around? Are there billboards, PSAs, do we talk about this a lot in Phoenix?
I don’t hear it a lot where it’s like, “Oh, we all need to take shorter showers or get rid of our lawns.” I’m not sure we think we live in a desert in that way.
CAMPBELL: Well, I would kind of push back on that and say I think absolutely we’ve seen that. I mean, if you look at the way that Phoenix area was settled and growth developed immediately after World War II, we sold ourselves as a desert oasis.
People put in palm trees, and they put in these lush lawns, and they put in all of these non-native plants. And they said,”Heck, if you could water it, you can grow anything here.” Which is true. You can.
But they kind of created an oasis in the middle of the desert. And if you look at Phoenix today, you can still see historic neighborhoods that were originally built with that purpose, but even they’re changing. But if you look at areas of the city of Phoenix and also the rest of the Valley that developed, let’s say after 1970, you see vastly different neighborhood schematics.
You can come to north parts of Phoenix, and you see more xeriscape than not. That’s not something that the city of Phoenix imposed upon development. It wasn’t something that the city of Phoenix required, at least not initially.
Now we are at a point where new development, residential development, we are starting to look to limiting front yard grass, etc., and requiring non-native plants, etc. But these are things that we really pushed hard through public education, through messaging.
And in some ways, maybe it’s better that you don’t remember the last time you saw a billboard because it’s so ingrained. But without strenuous requirements, we might have to go there someday. I’m not gonna say that’s not possible, but that’s not where we want to start.
GILGER: So it sounds like you are optimistic about the future of this city, even as we face this kind of dire future in terms of climate.
CAMPBELL: I definitely am. I think that Phoenix is in a position to be the most sustainable desert city on the planet, with advanced water purification with efficient use of water. I mean we do have to be aware of things like urban heat.
And I also should say — even though it’s not something that’s popular to say — there are limits, right? We have to recognize that there are limits on our water resources. At some point in time, you could push them to the point where you can’t make new resources.
We’re going to come as close as we can on advanced water purification, but at some point in time there is a limit unless something dramatically changes and we start importing water from another source, which people talk about.
But short of that, we do have to recognize that as long as there are limits, then we have to learn to live within our means. Because it would be bad if we got to the point where we’re using water in a way that’s just not sustainable.