From Aspen Public Radio (Marci Krivonen):
As cities grow and climate change continues, water managers are nervous. In the middle of a drought in 2012, they began to lay out a contingency plan. John McClow is President of the Colorado Water Congress. He says the idea was to come up with solutions in case the drought continued.
“Well it didn’t, as you know. But, we still feel like the potential is there and we need to have that plan in hand in order to be prepared should it occur. Because the results are catastrophic.”
McClow joined others from the seven Colorado River basin states on Wednesday in Snowmass Village to discuss how to respond to extreme drought.
One state that depends on the river is Arizona. Tom McCann manages the Central Arizona Project that delivers water to 5 million people. He says his organization could lose one-fifth of its supply by 2017.
“So what have we been doing to prepare for this coming shortage and the issues that we see on the river. One of the things we’ve done for some time now is to invest in system conservation and efficiency type projects,” he says.
His group is spending millions to conserve water. They’re also storing the resource underground and funding weather modification programs – like cloud seeding – in upper basin states, such as Colorado and Wyoming.
Still, there’s a problem, McCann says. The lower basin states, like Arizona, use more water than they get from Lake Mead so they depend on “equalization releases” from Lake Powell. Lake Powell supplies the upper basin with water.
“All of us in the lower basin and the basin in general, share the same risk. It’s the risk of Lake Powell going down creates risk of Lake Mead going down. The two reservoirs are operated together. We all live and die together as a basin,” McCann said…
Utah is one of the upper basin states. [Eric] Millis’ primary concern is that drought will bring Lake Powell down to critical levels. His state is expanding weather modification projects, looking to draw more water from upper basin reservoirs and increasing water conservation efforts…
“We’ve also been experiencing above-normal temperatures,” says Tanya Trujillo with the Colorado River Board of California. She says the temperatures have been “really increasing the challenges of trying to keep the water resources down. The hotter it is, the more water that tends to be applied, especially in outdoor situations.”
She says the Colorado River is the “good news” story for California this year because a full supply – partly from a good Colorado snowpack – helped fill a gap from dry California reservoirs.
The state has historically used water other lower basin states didn’t need but, that’s changing. Now states like Arizona are growing and need their full share. So, California’s investing in efficiency projects and fallowing farmland in order to transfer that water to cities.
More Colorado River Basin coverage here.