It’s been a record dry winter across the West — and it’s making an already bad situation on the Colorado River even worse. If water levels get any lower, Lake Powell and the dam that holds it back could be in dire straits.
So now, the federal government is stepping in to prop up water levels. But, as KJZZ’s Alex Hager reports, it could be a Band-Aid solution to a much bigger problem. Hager joined The Show to explain.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good to have you. So, what’s the situation on Lake Powell right now after this really dry winter? Kind of a worst-case scenario almost.
ALEX HAGER: Well, right now water levels there are forecast to drop to dangerously low levels as soon as this summer. And when I say dangerous, that means we would start to see some of the infrastructure in Glen Canyon Dam, which is up in Page, Arizona, start to fail. So water levels are on track right now to drop below the intakes for the hydropower turbines that sit inside the dam. That means it would become difficult or impossible to spin them and make electricity for 5 million people across seven states.
If water drops a little bit further than that, it might not be able to pass through the dam at all. We are already looking at — you know, if it falls below that hydropower intake, it could only travel through this little-used set of backup pipes. We don’t know that it could carry enough water through. You start to have all of these problems. So we are seeing some actions to prevent that from happening now.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So tell us about those actions. This is the federal government sort of taking control of at least this aspect of it. What are they going to do?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. The federal government is stepping in. It is kicking into action something of an emergency backup plan. It’s been done before, but it is definitely a backup plan. And they’re going to shuffle some water around. There is another big reservoir up in Utah and Wyoming called Flaming Gorge, and they’re going to release extra water from Flaming Gorge, send it down the Colorado River to help fill up Lake Powell.
At the same time, they’re going to start tightening the tap on Lake Powell, meaning that less water comes out of it. That water will — less of it will flow into the Grand Canyon downstream to Lake Mead and downstream to us.
LAUREN GILGER: So everybody gets less?
ALEX HAGER: It’s not necessarily that everybody gets less, it’s that less is coming out. So we’re having less in our reservoirs but not necessarily less in our taps.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So what does this mean for Phoenix, for cities in the Valley, for farmers around the state who use a lot of this water?
ALEX HAGER: This specific measure does not necessarily mean that we are going to get less water here in Arizona. However, at the same time, separately, there is another process going on that will determine how much less water we’ll have to take. That is a little bit of a bigger conversation, but right now we are looking at a federal proposal for cutbacks to help give more of a long-term solution to these dropping reservoir levels. Those cutbacks right now are disproportionately focused at the Central Arizona Project. That’s the canal that brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. The leaders of the Central Arizona Project said that those cuts could be devastating.
We are looking at places that would have significant reductions to the amount of Colorado River water they get every year. That’s cities and towns right here in the Valley, and a lot of them are scrambling right now to make sure that they have the backup plans in place to keep water flowing. Like tapping into groundwater or leaning a little harder on the Salt and Verde Rivers, which supply water separately.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so those are the kind of bigger conversations that are going on right now. In terms of what the feds just did yesterday or announced yesterday, what’s the reaction been like on the Upper Basin level? Like, they have to, as you said, release a bunch of water from their reservoirs.
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. Well, the big thing to know is that this move is being made against the backdrop of really tense negotiations between the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada, California — and the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. And they have been at odds for a long time, for decades. And right now they’re in the middle of really tense negotiations.
So anything that kind of puts a thumb on the scale in either direction is going to add tension. And that’s what happened here. So the Upper Basin said basically, "We don’t want you taking water from within our borders and sending it down to go prop up Lake Powell."
It is likely that the federal government is allowed to do that to shuffle that water around. It’s a little murky as to exactly the details and there is — you know, there is the potential that someone could take legal action over that. Right now it looks like they won’t, but the Upper Basin said, "Hey, look, we don’t like it and we want you to put all of that water back when you’re done."
However, it is not necessarily clear that there will be water to put back because there is not a lot of extra water to go around throughout the region.
LAUREN GILGER: ... OK. So, you talked to some experts about these moves from the feds and they are calling it a Band-Aid. What do they have to say about this?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. One person I interviewed said this is "like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound." The big problem here is that we have an imbalance in the amount of water that is in the Colorado River and the amount of water that we are taking out of the Colorado River.
This is not the problem. This is — the the situation we’re seeing at Lake Powell is the symptom of a much larger disease in Colorado River water use and that is the fact that mother nature is putting less in. The river is getting hotter and drier due to climate change, and humans have not done enough to rein in their demand on the river. Cities, farms and industry across the West — from Wyoming to San Diego — are using more than the river is willing to provide.
So this is a small, short-term fix to keep that dam running to keep Lake Powell operating as normal while we look at bigger solutions for figuring out how to correct that imbalance.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you mentioned those ongoing negotiations and how tense they are. What does the timeline look like on that? We’re getting pretty close, right?
ALEX HAGER: The clock is ticking and that ticking is getting louder, Lauren. Right now the negotiations are at a standstill. They basically have been for more than a year. But if we don’t see a plan soon, basically sometime this summer before October is kind of the deadline we’re looking at here, it is likely that the federal government could step in, impose its own plan on the states and have a big messy court battle because that’s unlikely to make anyone happy.
It is still in the hands of those seven states that use the Colorado River to come up with a solution to put their heads together to agree on ways to share the pain of region-wide cutbacks but so far they have not shown willingness to do that.
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