Dead pool is not just a super hero in the movies. In Arizona, it’s the grim reality we are barreling toward on one of our largest reservoirs: Lake Powell.
The Bureau of Reclamation says water levels at Lake Powell are looking bad. They're looking so bad that they could drop too low to generate hydropower as soon as next year. That could have major implications for millions of people in the West in terms of power and water in the not-so-distant future.
KUNC’s Alex Hager has been covering it all. He joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Alex.
ALEX HAGER: Good morning. Thanks for having me back.
GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So begin for us with just where Lake Powell is sitting right now. Like how bad is bad?
HAGER: Right now it is about 30% full. That is obviously not great for water supply, but, you know, it hasn't been that much more full for a while. We are seeing this reservoir at near record low levels after more than 20 years of drought, and that's sort of become the new normal up there. The thing that really raises the hairs on the back of water managers around the West, the thing that really puts them on edge, is when we start to see that hydropower engine in jeopardy. They have found ways to cope with the lower water levels, at least in the short term, but when it gets too low to dip, you know, to dip below the intake for those hydropower generators, then they start to get worried.
GILGER: OK, so we are looking at dead pool, which means, of course, there could not be enough, there might not be enough water to generate hydropower. What are the implications of that? Like if we are talking about power for millions of people in the west across lots of states, what does that look like?
HAGER: It's a little bit less to do with the actual ability to generate hydropower, and more to do with the fact that it lays bare that we do not have a good system for managing this reservoir, given the amount of water that's in it today. When water dips too low to turn those hydropower generators, we do have a fix for it. There is a big system of upstream reservoirs, so the dam where these generators are, it's in Page, Arizona, just south of the Utah border in the very far northern part of the state.
We can send water from other reservoirs further north in Wyoming, and Colorado and Utah to help fill up that reservoir, prop it up, and make sure that we don't lose the ability to generate hydropower. But that's kind of seen as an emergency Band-Aid. It is seen as something that we are not going to be able to do forever. And so when water managers enter this kind of emergency mode, it raises calls for, hey, we need a new long-term system to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
GILGER: There are implications for water supply too, right?
HAGER: Yeah, it's a sign that, you know, we do not have as much as we used to. Lake Powell, they often refer to it, you know, people in Western Water refer to it as the savings account for the Colorado River, and the fact that it is so low is a sign that our savings are dwindling. That is felt all across the region. It makes people antsy about the laws that we have to govern who gets how much water. But it also makes people prepare and try to institute some resilience.
You see that all around the Valley in Phoenix and so many of its neighboring cities. There are efforts to kind of figure out how to live with less. You know, programs to incentivize people to take out their thirsty lawns, you know, spending millions or even billions of dollars building facilities to recycle wastewater.
People are seeing the writing on the wall, you know, people in charge of cities and In charge of farms in a lot of cases are seeing the writing on the wall that there is not going to be enough water to go around in the future, and they are trying to institute systems that will help them cope with that when those days do arrive.
GILGER: Right. It makes it all more dire. So let's talk about those long term plans, right? Policymakers are in the middle of negotiations now to figure out long-term plans for shrinking Colorado River supply. We have lots of stakeholders involved in this. And last, I think we talked negotiations were at something of a standoff. Where do they stand now, Alex?
HAGER: Well, it's been a little bit of good news and a little bit of bad news. There was something that, you know, I'd seen some experts refer to as a glimmer of hope about a month ago when we saw the the earliest makings of a plan, basically showing that the seven states that had long been locked in disagreement for, for well over a year, you know, were starting to coalesce around a plan to share water based on how much is actually in the river and not based on antiquated laws that aren't kind of true to today's climate reality.
In the time since then though, we've seen them get really hung up again. You know, they could agree in concepts to say we should come up with a plan that's based on how much water in the river and, you know, reduce the total amount that we're trying to share and then figure out this, you know, what's what size everyone's slice of that pie is going to be.
But figuring out what size everyone's slice of that pie is going to be is really difficult because these are negotiations that are sitting on the shoulders of more than 100 years of rivalry between states that have long been going at it about who has the moral right to use more water and how that should be codified into law, and they are still really entrenched in some of those same old tensions in a way that is making it hard for them to implement, you know, ideas that will actually allow the west to share a river with less water in it, right?
GILGER: So history playing a role here. They have a 2026 deadline to come up with something where the federal government essentially steps in. It's looking like we might not make that deadline.
HAGER: It really all depends, you know. In the past, water leaders have waited for an outside force to come in and levy some pressure. I have talked to some of these top negotiators who basically say, look, we don't really expect to figure this out amongst ourselves. We kind of need a, you know, another party to come in and say, here are the consequences if you don't.
And so, you know, it's possible that in the remaining months here we could see the federal government all of a sudden get really aggressive and say we are going to implement this specific plan if you do not put your heads together and come up with something states and the states might say, well, now the consequences are laid bare in front of us —
GILGER: — we should really do something about it.
HAGER: But there's a lot, it depends, it's very contingent on a lot of different variables like the federal government. We don't know exactly how they will act. We don't know how quickly they will act. We don't know how much time they necessarily need to get this set in stone, because even though their deadline is, you know, kind of middle to late 2026, there's a lot of paperwork you have to get done. You know, you've got to do a lot of studies to make sure that this will not harm the system in some other ways.
