The Multistate Battle Over the Colorado River

Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

The Colorado River’s 1,450-mile run begins amid the snowy pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains and ends within the subtropical waters of the Gulf of California. Over the millions of years the river has been operating this course, it has steadily carved via the Southwest’s crimson limestone and shale to create a succession of unimaginably huge canyons: Ruby, Cataract, Marble, and Grand. The writer Marc Reisner described the Colorado as the “American Nile.” The Hualapai call it Hakataya, “the backbone.”

Starting in the early twentieth century, a lot of the Colorado’s pure majesty was corralled into a system of reservoirs, canals, and dams that now offers drinking water for 40 million people, irrigation for 5 million acres of farmland, and adequate power to light up a city the size of Houston. Not so way back, there was more than sufficient rainfall to keep this huge waterworks humming. The 1990s had been unusually moist, allowing the Colorado to fill its two sprawling reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, to 95 p.c of capability. By 2000, greater than 17 trillion gallons of water have been sloshing round within the reservoirs — more than sufficient to provide each family in the USA for a year.

Then the drought arrived. And by no means left. After the driest two-decade stretch in 12 centuries, both Mead and Powell fell under one-third of their capability last 12 months, throwing the Southwest into disaster. On January 1, mandatory cuts went into effect for the first time, forcing farmers in Arizona and the utility that gives water to metropolitan Las Vegas’s 2.3 million prospects to restrict their uptake from Lake Mead. Even with those cuts, Invoice Hasencamp, a water supervisor from Southern California, says, “The reservoir remains to be taking place, and it'll keep low for the next several years. I don’t suppose we’ll ever not have a scarcity going forward.”

If Hasencamp is true — and most scientists agree that America’s deserts will only get drier as the local weather disaster worsens — meaning he and other officers within the region have their work cut out for them to make sure that the Southwest stays hydrated. The Colorado River is currently ruled by a set of working pointers that went into effect in 2007, the most recent in an extended line of agreements that started with the unique Colorado River Compact in 1922. But that framework is set to expire in 2026, giving officers within the seven states through which the Colorado and its tributaries flow — together with their peers in Mexico and the 29 tribes whose ancestors have relied on the river for millennia — an alarmingly slender window to come back to a consensus on learn how to share a river that’s already flowing with one-fifth less water than it did in the twentieth century.

The Southwest’s water managers have been working feverishly this spring simply to prop up the system until formal negotiations can start next winter. In March, the water stage of Lake Powell declined under a threshold at which the Glen Canyon Dam’s potential to generate power turns into threatened, and the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal company that oversees the West’s water infrastructure, is working with the states above Lake Powell to divert more water to keep its dam operational. In the meantime, the states round Lake Mead have been hashing out the main points of a plan to voluntarily curtail their use to stop even more dramatic cuts to Arizona and Nevada from going into effect subsequent yr.

Poor hydrology isn’t the one factor on the water managers’ minds: They’re also contending with the yawning cultural and political chasm between the area’s city and rural interests as well as questions on who ought to undergo the most aggressive cuts and the way to better engage Indigenous communities which have traditionally been lower out of the dealmaking. All of that makes the Southwest’s deliberations over the Colorado River a window into how local weather change is placing pressure on divisions embedded throughout American society.

Pat Tyrrell, Wyoming’s former state engineer, says if the states fail to reach an accord, “we’re taking a look at 20, 30 years within the courtroom system.” That might be a nightmare scenario given how disastrous the past two decades have been for the river. Falling back on the prevailing framework of western legislation might result in a whole bunch of 1000's of people being stranded with out water or electricity — or, as John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority puts it, “a number of Katrina-level occasions across southwestern cities.” The negotiations, then, represent the primary main take a look at of the American political system’s means to collaboratively adapt to climate change. “I believe the states feel a powerful curiosity in working this thing by means of amongst ourselves so that we don’t end up there,” says Tyrrell. “We are able to’t end up there.”

Although the Colorado River is a single water system, the 1922 Colorado River Compact artificially divided the watershed in two. California, Nevada, and Arizona were designated the Lower Basin, whereas Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah were labeled the Upper Basin. Every group was awarded half of the river’s water, and a sequence of ensuing agreements divided that pot between the states in each basin according to their population and seniority. Mexico’s right to the Colorado took until 1944 to be enshrined, while each of the area’s 29 tribes had to battle for its entitlements in courtroom. Every water allocation in the multitude of treaties and settlements that department out from the unique compact is quantified using the agricultural unit of an acre-foot, the amount of water it takes to flood an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot (a useful rule of thumb is that one acre-foot is sufficient water to supply three households in the Southwest for one yr).

The fundamental flaw of this compact is that it was signed at a time of unprecedented rain and snowfall within the basin, which led its original framers to assume that 15 million acre-feet of water flowed by way of the Colorado yearly. In the 21st century, the annual average circulate has been closer to 12 million acre-feet, whilst far more continues to be diverted from Lake Mead and Lake Powell every year — that discrepancy helps to explain how the reservoirs have emptied so quickly. The opposite wrongdoer is climate change.

In March, Bradley Udall, a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University, gave a presentation at the College of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center that laid out a number of fashions for how much drier the basin might develop into by 2050, together with an especially horrifying forecast that the river could find yourself carrying 40 percent much less water than it averaged through the twentieth century. “There’s just loads of worrisome signs here that these flows are going to go decrease,” Udall says. Tanya Trujillo, who, because the assistant secretary for water and science on the Department of the Inside, is successfully the federal government’s prime water official, agrees with that assessment. “The bottom line is we’re seeing declining storage in both Lake Mead and Lake Powell,” she says. “But we’re additionally seeing growing danger of the system continuing to decline.”

The folks tasked with managing that decline are the select teams of civil engineers and lawyers who populate the varied state companies and utilities that take Colorado River water and ship it to municipal and agricultural customers. Each state has what amounts to a delegation of water specialists who are led by a “governor’s consultant,” with the exception of California, which defers to the three large irrigation districts in Imperial and Riverside counties in addition to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, popularly known as Met, which gives for 19 million residents of Greater Los Angeles and San Diego.

Hasencamp has been with Met since 2001 and now serves because the utility’s point person on the Colorado. He’s a Californian with deep roots — he lives in the Glendale home his grandfather constructed in the Thirties. On the time, the L.A. suburb had nearly as many residents as the entire state of Nevada. The outsize influence of Los Angeles within the basin has made it a kind of water bogeyman through the years, an impression Hasencamp has had to tamp down. “You’re coming from Los Angeles, no one trusts you,” he says, his ruddy face breaking right into a sporting grin. “‘The large metropolis slicker, coming here to steal our water to fill your swimming swimming pools.’ It's important to get over that hurdle. It takes a long time.”

Though he arrived at Met during a time of plenty, inside a yr the agency was scrambling to answer the worst water year ever recorded within the Southwest. In 2002, the Colorado shrank to just 3.8 million acre-feet — one-quarter of the flow assumed in the compact. “In 2003, we awakened and we lost half our water,” Hasencamp says. “We needed to scramble.” After a flurry of emergency measures, together with paying farmers to fallow their fields so their water may very well be diverted, the state managed to scale back its use by 800,000 acre-feet in a single year and has managed to not surpass its 4.4 million acre-feet allotment ever since.

Now, your complete area is facing the form of crisis California did in 2002 but with a lot much less margin for error. While the explosive population growth of Arizona and Nevada originally put stress on California to attract down its use within the Nineties, now the Higher Basin states of Utah and Colorado — every of which added over a half-million residents up to now decade — are adding strain to the system. Presently, the Higher Basin uses only about 4.5 million acre-feet of water every year, leaving roughly 2 million acre-feet that the four states are theoretically entitled to as they hold adding inhabitants.

As the chair of the lately shaped Colorado River Authority of Utah, Gene Shawcroft serves because the state’s lead negotiator. He grew up on a ranch along the Alamosa River in southern Colorado and was riveted by the West’s vast plumbing network from an early age. “Christmas was okay, however the best day of the year was when they turned the irrigation water on,” he says. Though he in any other case carries all the hallmarks of the taciturn Westerner, speaking about water can nonetheless make Shawcroft light up like a child on the holidays. “Now we have to study to stay with very, very dry cycles, and I still believe we’re going to get some wet years,” he says. “That’s part of the fun. I’m thrilled to demise we now have infrastructure in place that enables us to make use of the water when it’s available.”

Utah has the suitable to make use of about 1.7 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado, but it can't accumulate from Lake Powell (its major aqueduct, the Central Utah Mission, connects solely Salt Lake City with the river’s tributaries). Given Utah’s speedy development, the state’s politics are increasingly revolving around the pursuit of extra water. Late last yr, Governor Spencer Cox gave an interview to the Deseret News through which he known as the disinclination of many in the West to dam more rivers “an abomination,” and his workplace has pushed hard for a pipeline between Lake Powell and town of St. George within the southwest nook of the state, about two hours from Las Vegas.

But pipelines and dams are helpful solely so long as there’s water to be stored and transported. That’s why Cox launched a video final summer time through which he informed his constituents that the state needed “some divine intervention” to solve its problems. “By praying collaboratively and collectively, asking God or no matter higher power you consider in for more rain, we might be able to escape the deadliest points of the continuing drought.” The early returns from the pray-for-rain technique haven't been good, as this winter’s snowpack signifies that 2022 will probably be just as dry as 2021.

Shawcroft is more clear-eyed about Utah’s situation. (Cox’s workplace declined my interview request.) “The upper-division states for the last 20 years have been dwelling with less water than what their allocations have been just because that’s what Mother Nature supplied,” he says. “We’re not in a scenario the place now we have this huge reservoir sitting above us and we say, ‘Okay, this yr we’re going to cut again. We’re going to take 70 %, or 50 % of 20 p.c, or 99 percent.’” As he properly is aware of from having grown up along the Alamosa, “we solely get what comes by way of the streams.”

Despite those limitations, the Higher Basin has managed to divert greater than 500,000 acre-feet to Lake Powell since final year, mostly by sending water downstream from a handful of smaller reservoirs on the Colorado’s tributaries. Though these transfers may maintain Glen Canyon Dam running this yr, they've severely limited the basin’s potential to reply if the level of Lake Powell keeps falling. Down within the Decrease Basin, efforts have been focused on the so-called 500+ Plan, an agreement between California, Arizona, and Nevada to proactively lower their uptake from Lake Mead by 500,000 acre-feet this year and next in hopes of slowing its decline. While the states have managed to come up with about 400,000 acre-feet so far, many within the area are skeptical that the Lower Basin can do it again in 2023. Still, Entsminger, Nevada’s lead negotiator, sees the plan as a exceptional success story, particularly given how shortly it was carried out. “It’s like exercise,” he says. “ what’s better than nothing? Anything.”

At the Stegner conference where Udall made his dire prediction, Entsminger shared that his agency is now planning for the annual movement of the Colorado to fall to only 11 million acre-feet. Given how squirrelly water officials can become when it’s time to speak about precise water, many within the room had been bowled over that Entsminger can be willing to dial in on a projection so particular — and so low. Later on, Arizona’s lead negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, joked, “I gained’t say I comply with 11. I might get arrested once I get off the aircraft in Phoenix.”

After I caught up with Entsminger a number of days after the conference, he was matter-of-fact in regards to the declaration. “The typical of the final 20 years is 12.3 million acre-feet, proper? For those who’re saying from right now to mid-century the average circulate of the river only goes down one other 10 percent, you’re fortunate.” In some ways, Entsminger is an ideal messenger for this sort of reality examine. Contrary to its fame for losing water on golf programs and the Bellagio’s fountains, Las Vegas has the most environment friendly water-recycling system in the US. Entsminger’s utility has lower its intake from Lake Mead by 26 % up to now two decades, a interval that noticed metropolitan Las Vegas add more residents than the inhabitants of Washington, D.C.

Although California and Arizona are in less enviable positions, officials in both states appear reasonable about the necessity to reduce their water consumption. “If the last 30 years repeats itself, the Decrease Basin should cut its use by about 1 million acre-feet,” says Hasencamp. “If the longer term’s dryer than it’s been the final 30 years, it may very well be 1.5, 2 million acre-feet.” Balancing the region’s accounts within the coming many years will mean adopting even more aggressive conservation and recycling measures in addition to placing extra fallowing deals with irrigation districts.

The Southwest’s tribes will play a pivotal function in these negotiations, as many are entitled to more water than they are able to use (that's, as long as they've been in a position to secure a water-rights settlement, which many are nonetheless in the strategy of pursuing). In 2019, the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix, agreed to a cope with Arizona that noticed a few of its water directed to the state’s underground reserves and some left in Lake Mead, producing tens of tens of millions of dollars in income for the tribe. This spring, Senator Mark Kelly launched a invoice in Congress that might allow the Colorado River Indian Tribes — a confederation of Hopi, Navajo, Mohave, and Chemehuevi peoples — to negotiate a lease with Arizona much like what it has already signed with Met and the Palo Verde Irrigation District in California (the group’s reservation is split between the 2 states). I spoke with the tribe’s chair, Amelia Flores, shortly after she testified in assist of the laws on Capitol Hill. “Everybody must be part of the answer,” she says. “It’s not nearly one tribe or one water consumer; it must be everyone to save the lifetime of the river.”

Upstream, the dedication to everybody in the basin sharing the pain of the Colorado’s decline is much less clear. “Right now, the Lower Basin makes use of over 10 million acre-feet a yr, while the Higher Basin uses underneath 5 million acre-feet,” says Rebecca Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “Will we take extra hits as a result of the Decrease Basin has develop into reliant? They’re not just using greater than their apportionment. They have turn into reliant on it.”

Clearly, a serious gap stays between the two basins about how future cuts should be shared. “Frankly, I don’t blame the Upper Basin,” says California’s Hasencamp. “From their perspective, the compact was supposed to separate the river in two with kind of equal quantities, and the promise was we’ll sign the compact so we are able to grow into our amount into the longer term. The Lower Basin was able to develop. We’ve been enjoying our full quantity for a lot of a long time. It’s comprehensible the Upper Basin feels that it’s unfair. However life ain’t fair.”

Maybe all the states will end up agreeing to cut their apportionments by the identical percentage. Possibly the Higher Basin will get its approach and the cuts can be tilted more steeply toward California and Arizona, giving the smaller states some breathing room to keep growing into their allocations — thus delaying an aggressive embrace of conservation measures that can almost certainly become necessary because the river continues to say no. “Obviously, each state needs to protect its personal curiosity,” says Utah’s Shawcroft. “However everybody is aware of we’ve bought to resolve this. Nobody wants to do anything however roll up their sleeves and determine find out how to make it work.”

Whereas in ordinary times, the governors’ delegates might meet a couple of times a year, throughout the spring they were talking on a weekly foundation. Most of the negotiators I spoke with via Zoom appeared sleep-deprived, staring vacantly at the digital camera and pausing frequently to rub their eyes or therapeutic massage their temples. John Fleck has authored several books on the Colorado and serves as a writer-in-residence at the University of New Mexico; he says the tension between the two basins was palpable on the Stegner conference, with many Decrease Basin negotiators expressing their frustration with these from the Upper Basin seeming to forged the present disaster as one which California, Arizona, and Nevada have created and are liable for fixing. From the other side, Mitchell advised me she discovered it “nearly offensive” when Lower Basin managers look to the excess allocations upriver as the one resolution to the scarcity. “It was a tense few days,” Fleck says. “We’ve reached a degree where the buffers are gone and we can no longer avoid these onerous conversations.”

In April, Secretary Trujillo ratcheted up the stress when she sent a letter to the area’s principal negotiators that established the federal authorities’s priority as protecting Lake Powell above 3,490 feet of elevation, the threshold after which the Glen Canyon Dam ceases to produce energy and ingesting water might turn out to be unattainable to deliver to the close by town of Web page, Arizona, and the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation. To that finish, Trujillo wrote that the Division of the Interior “requests your consideration of probably reducing Glen Canyon Dam releases to 7.0 [million acre-feet] this yr.” Making that occur would require the Decrease Basin to double the cuts it has been haggling over by means of the 500+ Plan. If those states are unable to figure out a workable solution, the Division of the Inside has authority under the current working tips to crank down the spigot of the Colorado and ship only 7 million acre-feet anyway.

The Feds taking unilateral motion to keep Glen Canyon Dam on-line would be completely unprecedented. But the truth that such a transfer now not seems unimaginable is a mark of how precarious the scenario has change into. “When the pie’s shrinking, who’s going to take shortage and the way a lot?” asks Hasencamp. “Each scarcity you don’t take, someone else does. We’re all in this together, we all must be part of the answer, and all of us need to sacrifice. However we all need to be protected. We can’t have a city or agricultural area dry up and wither whereas others thrive. It’s one basin. Like it or not, you’re all a part of L.A.”

The one story you shouldn’t miss as we speak, chosen by New York’s editors.

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive electronic mail correspondence from us.