Drought Has West in Chokehold

After five years of distressingly low rain and snowfall, a drought is hammering the West harder than ever, causing multibillion-dollar economic losses and prompting unprecedented measures in many states to cope with less water.

With the start of winter, little optimism exists that the coming months will fix the problems. Weather forecasts are equivocal.

Explosive population growth, environmental lawsuits to divert water for wildlife and below-average precipitation have put a strain on the big federal reservoirs that supply the West but were designed decades ago when the outlook was far different.

“The drought is still raging in many places,” said John W. Keys III, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates the key dams in Western states. “Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Montana are in really bad shape. The Missouri River is at historic lows. The Platte River and Rio Grande are way down.”

Nowhere is the situation more serious than the Colorado River basin, a key lifeline in seven states that provides 65% of Southern California’s water.

Lake Mead has dropped by more than 90 feet in recent years, so low that the federal government might have to curtail water deliveries in the next few years. And the outlook remains grim, with official estimates giving only a 1 in 5 chance that the lake will refill by the end of the decade.

Lake Powell, the massive impoundment of the Colorado River behind Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, has dropped below the halfway mark for the first time since it was filled in the 1960s. Like a ring around a bathtub, a band of discolored rock for hundreds of miles graphically shows the progress of the drought.

Less water translates to less electricity production, as well. The massive generators at Glen Canyon have produced just 30% of their capacity this year.

Water agencies are no longer betting on Mother Nature: The Southern Nevada Water Authority approved a plan Thursday to extend its intake pipes 50 feet deeper into Lake Mead to prevent sucking air if lake levels continue to drop.

The situation in Arizona, where the state pays out $1 million a month for homeowners not to grow grass, is just as bad.

“We have depleted our reservoirs,” said Herb Guenther, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. “We still have groundwater basins to fall back on.”

Across the Continental Divide, the conditions are similarly bad. Elephant Butte Dam, the largest reservoir on the Rio Grande and the main supply of water for New Mexico, is holding just 10% of its capacity, and managers have curtailed deliveries.

In the Pacific Northwest, tributaries to the Columbia and Snake rivers remain in drought conditions, and reservoirs in Oregon, Washington state and Idaho are below normal. With court orders to maintain adequate water for endangered salmon and steelhead, the federal government is spending $15 million this year to buy water for the fish and make other recovery efforts.

California, meanwhile, embodies the best and the worst of the situation. It was the only Western state with above-average precipitation last winter, meaning that its big reservoirs at Shasta and Oroville are higher than average for this time of the year, according to the Department of Water Resources.

But of any state, California has sustained some of the worst effects of the lengthy drought, officials say.

The wildfires that raged across six counties in Southern California’s mountains in October were the direct result of the same drought that is causing Lake Mead to drop, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Fed by dry brush and dead trees, the fires killed 24 people and caused $3 billion in insured property losses.

This month, when Colorado River water managers assembled on the Las Vegas Strip for their annual convention, the city was deluged by a storm that dropped 2.5 inches of water in a few hours. But it provided only momentary relief.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the group that the Colorado River will carry below-normal water this winter. The weather outlook is so unpredictable, owing to Pacific Ocean conditions, that forecasters say they can offer little reliable guidance.

Even if Mother Nature supplies above-average snow and rain, the soil is so parched and water tables are so low across the seven-state Colorado River basin that runoff reaching the stream will remain below normal.

The West’s water system is based on expectations that developed in the early 20th century. But studies of tree-growth rings have shown that those were the wettest decades in 500 years and that the current drought may be a better representation of the norm.

“We don’t know what normal is in the West,” said Denise Fort, a University of New Mexico law professor who chaired a commission on Western water issues. “That is sobering. This is a severe drought, and no one knows what the duration will be. We should not expect conditions to switch back.”

What’s more, global warming could further exacerbate the long-term water outlook, said Dennis Lettenmaier, a University of Washington engineer who recently led a hydrologic study of three big Western rivers: the Columbia, the Sacramento/San Juan and the Colorado.

More of the West’s precipitation will fall as rain, rather than winter snow. The effect will increase the number of drought years in California and reduce the number of above-average wet years, Lettenmaier said. The Colorado, meanwhile, will sustain a 10% loss of volume, which he calls “a big problem.”

“The system has always been able to meet water-delivery targets, but with a 10% reduction, you start failing to meet those schedules,” Lettenmaier said.

Federal officials are warning Western water officials to brace for exactly that kind of future. At the Las Vegas meeting of the Colorado River users, Bennett Raley, assistant Interior secretary for water and science, said the time has come to develop a plan for handling shortages on the Colorado system.

Ever since 1922, when Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California agreed on a sharing compact, the river has never failed to deliver the minimum allocations. But that run of luck may be drawing to a close, and Raley warned that a sharing agreement is needed soon if states are going to avoid “chaos and irrational conflict.”

“It is not a bitter pill; it is just reality,” Raley said. “Our crystal ball doesn’t tell us if this drought is going to end or not.”

At Hoover Dam, Bureau of Reclamation officials expect Lake Mead to drop an additional 12 feet by next year. However, hot and windy conditions could cause additional evaporation; if Mead drops by 14 feet, a federal declaration will be made that will shut off surplus water deliveries to Southern California. At some undetermined lower level, a shortage would be declared.

Nobody knows how much water deliveries could drop or what kind of criteria would be used to allocate shortages -- whether everybody would get hit by the same percentage reduction or something more complex. An argument could be made by cities that they would put the water to greater use, for example.

If the West’s water problems persist, there will be more battles over existing water, such as a fight this year between San Diego and the Imperial Irrigation District over their allocation of the Colorado, experts say.

What is not likely is any massive state investments to trap more water. Colorado voters, for example, recently voted down a bond measure for a new water project in that drought-stricken state.

At the Las Vegas water meeting, some managers were hopeful that the federal government would enact a new era of dam building. That’s not too likely, Keys said. The budget for the Bureau of Reclamation is under tremendous pressure, and Congress is in no mood for more spending.

“There is not enough money to build new storage,” Keys said. “I don’t see us doing construction of anything new in the next few years, but eventually we will need them.”