Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Brooke Larsen and David Condos). Here’s an excerpt:
October 20, 2026
Transbasin diversions, such as the Central Utah Project, bring water from the Colorado River Basin to the Great Basin, where most Utahns live.
A massive concrete wall rises 200-feet above a trickling creek where Duchesne County’s tan plateaus transform into green forested slopes. Behind it, snowmelt from the Uinta Mountains pools into a dark blue reservoir, water lapping on red rock shores. At just over 8,000 feet in elevation, the Upper Stillwater Dam marks the start of the Central Utah Project, which conveys water from the Colorado River Basin to the Great Basin where around 90% of Utahns live…From Upper Stillwater, a drop of water, which otherwise would flow to the Duchesne River, then the Green River before meeting the Colorado, begins a journey west. It does that thanks to decades of engineering and over 100 miles of tunnels, pipelines and diversions that carry the water to the state’s biggest cities. After a pit stop at Strawberry Reservoir, it cuts through the mountains and flows into pipelines that deliver water to farms, lawns and taps across the Wasatch Front. Some of that water even makes it as far as the Salt Lake City International Airport…
In all, just over a quarter of the water used in Salt Lake, Utah and Wasatch counties comes from the Colorado River Basin, according to Utah State University…In addition to the Central Utah Project, two other major transbasin diversions and a handful of small projects bring Colorado River water to the Great Basin. The Provo River Water Users Association diverts water from the Duchesne River to the Provo River for farms in the Heber and Kamas areas and cities such as Sandy and Orem. The Strawberry Valley Project, one of the oldest transbasin diversions in the West, brings water from the Strawberry Reservoir to farms and cities in Utah County. This project [predates] the Central Utah Project and distributes water to users separately, but aspects of the two projects’ operations have become integrated at Strawberry Reservoir…All the transbasin diversions combined diverted around 165,000 acre-feet of water in 2024 to the Great Basin, according to the Upper Colorado River Commission, making up around 15% of Utah’s total Colorado River consumptionthat year.
