THE COLORADO RIVER CUTOFF
Can rules dividing the water hold as drought deepens?
PINEDALE, Wyo. — Tom Johnston grew up in the Pinedale area and then moved one county to the northwest to be a ski patroller at Jackson Hole. From there he became involved with the U.S. ski team, which hired him to contour snow for races. He shaped the slopes the women’s runs at several Winter Olympics, starting at Utah’s Snowbasin in 2002, and continues to work on domestic World Cup events.
When he’s not on the slopes, he’s a farmer and, like a lot of others like him in Wyoming, he needs outside income.
“I have to support my cow habit,” he said.
In June, Johnston patrolled fields he rents from Hagenstein, clearing weeds from the ditches to keep water from pooling and seeping through the dirt. “Every time I clean the ditch on this place, I save 20%.”
Unlike a lot of local farmers, he said, he has precision-leveled the fields to ensure he gets the most out of flood irrigation without waste. The fields tilt slightly to move water faster and percolate less of it below the roots.
Declining runoff from the mountains has created enough uncertainty without even considering the pressures from downstream users, he said. Soon, he expects, other states will make a “call” on the river, the term for when the government enforces senior rights by cutting off junior rights.
Efficiency will be paramount.
“That’s one of the reasons I bust my ass,” Johnston said as he toted a shovel along a ditch. “That call is coming.”
Two decades of drought have reduced the Colorado River’s yearly flow, increasing uncertainty among water users across seven states. The river is regulated by a compact negotiated 100 years ago, when there was more water and far fewer people. Now the states are reconsidering the terms of the compact and water rights holders in the river’s upper reaches fear they will come up short.
Across the river from Johnston, rancher Michael Klaren fears that if people keep moving to the Southwest, they will wrestle away more of the water he needs to raise cows that, by his estimate, feed 1,500 people a year. His own family, including a new daughter-inlaw, eat about a cow and a half each year, he said, and he was preparing to drive a few to slaughter on that day in March.
“I understand people need to drink water,” Klaren said. “I do. But I also understand people’s need for food, and that’s what we do.”
First and foremost, the Colorado River of the 21st century grows food. While rural Rocky Mountain residents grumble about swimming pools and golf courses as the wasteful receptacles for the water they watch flowing downstream, most of this river that rarely reaches the sea leaves its channel through canals and ditches to irrigate a mind-boggling farm empire that produces 15% of America’s crops. That bounty includes most of the nation’s winter greens, grown in and around Yuma and southern California, keeping salads on tables nationwide in any season.
Roughly half of the Colorado’s flow grows feed for livestock.
Farms use at least three-quarters of the water that Americans and Mexicans take from the river before draining it entirely south of the border. Eliminate Phoenix and all of its golf courses and pools, exile the desert city’s 1.7 million inhabitants and return their full annual share of 186,557 acre-feet to the river, and, at best, you will have saved about a tenth of the water that federal officials say they need to keep power and water flowing from Hoover Dam beyond the next few years.
The region’s cities have grown dramatically, but water use has not tracked population growth. Instead, residents have reduced what they pour into lawns and pools, and have updated indoor fixtures, to the point that growth in the big cities has not increased consumption. Phoenix uses roughly the same amount as it did 30 years ago, when it had 600,000 fewer residents.
Rural farmers like Klaren, his neighbors and their state representative now feel all eyes on them.
“My fear, as a rancher and a legislator that represents ranchers, is what’s going to be the gold rush in the state of Wyoming to supply industries and municipalities” within the state, Pinedale Rep. Albert Sommers told The Arizona Republic. “Thank God we cannot sell water to you guys (in the Southwest), because that’s a gold rush that we cannot afford.”
Bought out or not, Wyoming and the other high-elevation states are required to supply downstream states their shares. It’s a reality that will squeeze farms and ranches around the headwaters unless and until nature again blesses the Rockies with ample snows for multiple years on end, restocking the reservoirs. Until then, everyone in the watershed faces hardship if the river’s 40 million dependents don’t conserve enough together.
The tribes: ‘This was a theft of our water, literally’
Dozens of Native American tribes inhabit the Colorado River watershed, and their rights to water both complicate the crisis and offer possible solutions to it.
Through various settlements approved by Congress or the courts, tribes have secured rights to more than 3 million acre-feet from the river, or more than Arizona’s full share. Their water comes out of their respective states’ allocations and generally enjoys a high legal priority during shortages, a recognition that they used the water long before the compact was written.
The tribes collectively use far less than their legal share. In some cases that’s because they haven’t needed it yet; in others because they lack canals, pipes and pumps to move it to their farmers and residents. Within Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes on the state’s western edge and the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix are among the state’s largest holders of rights to the river, with more than 1 million acre-feet between them.
As it began to consider options for writing new dam operation guidelines, the Bureau of Reclamation this fall invited tribal leaders to share ideas during an online listening session in October. Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores told federal officials her community stood ready to conserve water on its farms if the agency supplies funding.
“It’s not a secret that we have water,” she said. “So your decisions will determine if we can make it available.”
Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis recently offered to leave up to 125,000 acre-feet of tribal water in Lake Mead in each of the next three years. The Bureau of Reclamation would pay for $400 an acre-foot out of funds Congress approved for drought mitigation in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Tribes had no say in how states divided the river 100 years ago. By then, settlers had diverted the Gila River onto farms, depleting the resources that had sustained the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh tribes that live and farm on Gila River Indian Community.
“This was a theft of our water, literally,” Lewis told The Republic. It dealt trauma and dietary changes, such as reliance on government commodities, that still afflict members’ health. “It was a total upheaval of our society.”
The community regained water, including from the Colorado, in a 2004 settlement that has since allowed it to store water for future use or sales, and to restore a stretch of the Gila for natural and cultural values. Elders collect plants there to weave into traditional baskets.
Now, Lewis said, state and federal officials must consult and collaborate with tribes as they seek to reverse the crisis on the Colorado.
But not all tribes have settled their rights to river water. The Navajo and Hopi tribes have not reached agreements on how much of Arizona’s water they will control, for instance. When they do, other users may be cut off.
This would be a reversal of what University of Arizona sociologist Andrew Curley, a Navajo, calls Indigenous resource dispossession. Dams and canals reaching hundreds of miles off-river depleted the Colorado. “We’re seeing the actual limitations of that kind of worldview,” he said.
Now, those who control the river have a chance to adopt a different system, one that collaborates to sustain life for all, rather than exploiting the less powerful and pumping the river away. Otherwise, Curley said, it is the tribes who have already proven they can and will survive in the region.
“We’ve been at zero for a long time, and we are still living in these areas,” he said. “It’s your communities that are living under crisis (and) that are more vulnerable.”
The business: Vegetable growers say their future is at stake
In the fields of far southwestern Arizona, water has rarely been at risk. Until now.
Yuma hums with trucks and harvest machinery virtually year-round as crews rotate through some of America’s sunniest and most productive vegetable patches.
John Boelts has thrived here since he uprooted from Nebraska during his childhood, leaving behind the Great Plains farm crisis of the 1980s. Typically, one of his biggest worries has been finding enough workers to pick his produce. Water wasn’t a problem so long as Lake Mead was flush with nearly two years worth of river flows. Yuma irrigation districts enjoy some of the river’s oldest rights and, unlike their counterparts in Wyoming, always had ample storage to draw down.
Now, with Lake Mead holding less than a third of its capacity, he worries about a river that could stop flowing past Yuma.
Boelts irrigates 2,000 acres with Colorado River water that grows one or two crops of lettuce and other vegetables in winter, wheat in spring, melons in fall and spring, and durum wheat and cotton in spring and summer. He grows some alfalfa year-round, to produce livestock feed and to renew his soils.
He accepts that Arizona’s farms must be more efficient in order to save the river that supplies them. His farm includes a mix of leveled flood irrigation and, on the melons, drip lines that he says have contributed to a double-digit percentage reduction from him and his neighbors.
But the state’s suburban growth threatens the life he and his neighbors have built, as a disputed purchase of farm water one county north of him shows. There, in La Paz County, a private company has agreed to fallow ground and send the water savings to Queen Creek. The state and the Bureau of Reclamation have signed off, though local officials continue to fight the transfer in court.
If metro Phoenix wants to push Yuma farmers to save water to support everyone else, Boelts said, then first it should work harder at its own conservation. To this point, Arizona cities have encouraged conservation but have not restricted residential use. All Arizonans require affordable food, he said, and he produces it.
“We need to stop looking at each other as haves and have-nots or (as being) in competition,” Boelts said. “We’re all working together.”
One of his Yuma County neighbors, third-generation farmer Robbie Woodhouse, said the area’s farmers have long worked to improve their efficiency, and will now work harder to keep water in Lake Mead.
“It’s the lifeblood of the southwestern United States,” he said. “And we need to all do our part to preserve as much of it as we can.”
That includes some compensated, seasonal fallowing to help keep water behind the dam, he said. But moving water permanently from farm to city would clear out rural schools, kill rural jobs and force the remaining farmers to pay more per-person to keep up the canals that supply them.
Woodhouse’s grandfather was among those who lobbied Congress in the last century to get water to the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigiation District, where he now serves on the board. Now it’s his turn to convince federal officials to let them keep it, potentially setting his irrigation district against others who want to use the water before it gets to Lake Mead.
“We’ll lobby our voice as hard as we can, obviously,” Woodhouse said.
Boelts employs several dozen people on the farm, 30 of them year-round. But in late January there were dozens more working there as packing companies dispatched harvest crews to gather his romaine lettuce.
One crew loaded a conveyor that moved the heads to a truck after they had knifed them from the soil and inspected them. They skirted a patch that a pest patroller had flagged after finding coyote tracks in the rows. The predator had likely trotted over from the dry Gila River bed above its confluence with the Colorado. Although it left no visible droppings, produce companies would reject it to prevent foodborne illness.
The approved heads would go to a cooler in town, then to a distribution center to be packaged or blended into salad mixes. Those bound for Phoenix would be on shelves within three days; those for the East Coast in perhaps five.
“The benefit to people is food that’s immensely affordable,” Boelts said.
Relying on foreign farmers is risky, Boelts said. It’s a point that Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke would later reiterate to The Republic, at a time when U.S. ports were keeping international freighters waiting for months at a time to unload. The state risks far more than its continued urban growth if the river dries up.
“If that container (ship) contains lettuce,” Buschatzke said, “there’s not going to be lettuce three months later.”
Boelts and other Yuma farmers have generally enjoyed more secure, predictable water supplies than headwaters irrigators such as Klaren in Wyoming. That’s because they’re downstream of Lake Mead. They’re arguably in competition with those upstream irrigators as the government considers new restrictions.
But that’s not how Boelts prefers to see it. To him, the biggest threat is continued diversions to cities, and especially to coastal California, the West’s biggest population center.
Boelts wants the states and feds to invest in ocean desalination and water recycling projects that could allow the Los Angeles area to leave behind its share of the river. The states are studying and advocating such projects, but none is considered a full answer to the crisis on the river.
Saving the river will require major on-farm changes. As an immediate step, federal officials in October proposed paying farmers at least $330 for every acre-foot they temporarily forego, or up to $400 for extended deals. Yuma farmers have so far rejected that figure and sought to quadruple it in hopes of installing more drip lines and other expensive efficiency upgrades.
The evolution: Shrinking river threatens once-ironclad water rights
Rural communities in states with smaller congressional delegations have long feared they’d lose out when the reservoirs dry up. As conditions worsen, the urgency is also shaking big-state farmers with seemingly ironclad rights to a river that can no longer provide any guarantees.
The anxiety is perhaps nowhere more bewildering than in Southern California’s rural desert interior, about an hour’s drive west of Yuma and two hours east of San Diego. There, between the U.S.-Mexico border at Calexico and the Salton Sea’s desiccated playa, the Imperial Irrigation District has long held both the river’s biggest water share and one of its most legally protected.
Men in plaid shirts took turns rising to address the men and women in suits at the Imperial Irrigation District’s May board meeting in El Centro, California. They urged the district to reject a rare plan to curb farmers’ water during the rest of this year.
“It’s not fair,” Imperial County farmer Tyler Sutter complained to the board. He wanted the district to dip into its dollar reserves to pay other farmers to conserve more, rather than rationing his water.
“You guys are just hog-tying us,” said farmer Jim Abatti, whose family had previously sued and delayed the district from restricting farmers and has since filed another lawsuit.
Before this century, with swollen Colorado River reservoirs that looked more likely to spill over their dams than to slump below the intakes, Imperial irrigated without firm limits.
Since accepting a yearly grant of 3.1 million acre-feet in the dry decades since, the district has sometimes used slightly more than its share, with a pledge to cut back later and stay within its water budget on a rolling three-year average. That gave farmers flexibility to capitalize when a given crop’s prices were high, but it wasn’t going to fly with federal water managers in this year of shortage along the river.
At the time of the meeting, the district projected using 3% more than its allocation if it didn’t act. To prevent that, board members were about to advance a plan that effectively tied farmers’ water volumes to the amount they typically used on their fields over the past decade.
Sticking to a field’s 10-year average is what Sutter feared would cost him, he later told The Republic. He had purchased some of his land in the past few years, and now farmed year-round on ground that the previous owners had farmed seasonally, which required less water. Staying within his land’s 10-year average would reduce his alfalfa cuttings. It’s a loss for him, but also for supermarket dairy and meat customers. “Food matters,” he said.
The district water manager, Tina Shields, told The Republic that the restrictions would put the department on “a little bit of a diet.” The move was important, she said, because Imperial politicians and everyone else in the region will naturally look to Imperial as the clamor for water conservation crescendos.
“If you use a lot of water, you can save a lot of water,” Shields said. And Imperial uses the most.
The valley is a yawning, 813-squaremile cornucopia stuffed with artichokes, lettuce, spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, alfalfa hay and a town that calls itself the Carrot Capital of the World.
It is a smorgasbord churning out $2 billion a year on 300-plus days of sunshine and just 3 inches of rain, less than half of Phoenix’s typical moisture. It would not grow much of anything edible without redirecting Colorado River flows into furrows and sprinklers.
When Lake Mead is full, Imperial’s reign on the Colorado is unassailable. It enjoys rights predating the compact and most others on the river, and whenever it asks Reclamation for a pulse of water through Hoover Dam it can expect to see the river rise to meet its headgates within three days.
Yet Mead is nowhere near full, and a legal right, no matter how senior, isn’t wet water.
“I can frame that damn puppy,” former Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy said during a Vail Symposium discussion on preserving the river last month. “I can hang it on a wall. But if nothing comes south out of Hoover Dam, I’ve got nothing.”
Imperial Valley, like every smaller water consumer on the river, must help save water, said Mulroy, now a senior fellow in climate adaptation for the Brookings Institution. The river needs collaborations, not winners and losers.
“Finding your favorite villain, whether it’s the farmer or it’s the city, it matters not,” she said. “It’s not going to get us there.”
The shift to more efficient irrigation on the Elmore Co. ‘scantaloupes, sweet corn and carrots is one expensive sign of this new reality. A decade ago the Imperial Valley farm flooded its fields of melons, corn and forage. Farm manager
Kevin Kenagy said he has since shifted 85% to sprinklers and 15% to even more efficient drip lines. This year’s corn crop saved more than 600,000 gallons per acre with the new methods, he said.
“We’ve got to be realistic,” he said. “There’s obviously less water going down the river than we thought. Rights or not, everybody’s got to get by with less.”
Others around the valley have invested heavily in other on-farm conservation methods. Some have installed pump systems to return unused water that runs off of flood-irrigated to the tops of the furrows.
One, Andrew Leimgruber, showed The Republic a precision sprinkler system that cost $400,000 and saves more than 150,000 gallons on each of 160 acres of alfalfa. His system is automated from his phone, rolling across the field at his command, and draws from a new, concrete-lined ditch. Using moisture sensors, he can program the sprinklers to give only what the crop needs.
These water savers are made affordable by an agreement that Imperial grudgingly made with San Diego County when it agreed to live within a 3.1 million-acre-foot water budget in 2003. San Diegans would pay the farmers for conserved water, and gain access to about 200,000 acre-feet of it for urban needs each year. Farmers get between $150 and $300 for every conserved acrefoot.
While he’s doing his part to protect the river, he would not support changing the river compact in a way that reduces Imperial’s favored position in the pecking order.
“In times of shortage,” he said, “it’s not fair to rewrite the rules. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a Law of the River?”
Imperial Irrigation District officials refer to fallowing — the temporary act of drying up lands and turning back their irrigation water to the river — as “the F word.”
But sensing that the impending emergency could disrupt life as its farmers know it, the district this fall joined the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles in offering to take federal payments to reduce California’s yearly deliveries of river water by 400,000 acrefeet.
That proposal has met with mixed reviews in other states, from acknowledgments that California is offering a first step toward equity to criticism that it’s only doing what Upper Basin farmers often must without any compensation.
California’s offer represents about 9% of the state’s normal share of the Colorado, compared with the 21% that Arizona will give up next year because of the Central Arizona Project junior water right. But if federal officials do cement such deals, California’s offer would jump-start the region’s stalled efforts to save the 2 million to 4 million acre-feet the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says it needs to halt the reservoirs’ slide. The agency had asked the states to propose that much in new conservation efforts by August, but they failed to produce a plan at that point.
It was an offering that reflected a growing recognition around the watershed that those who refuse to yield any of their water risk inviting the Interior secretary to make cuts unilaterally. That kind of federal muscle could set off a chain reaction of lawsuits delaying any action until it’s too late.
“The system will crash before we even get to court,” Shields predicted.
The future: Some changes won’t be temporary
Heading into the negotiations that will define how the government divvies the river for years to come, states and their major water users are struggling to set boundaries to protect both their rights and the river.
Imperial is willing to conserve and to discuss forgoing water for as long as shortage continues on the river, said Shields, the district’s water manager. But the negotiations for new guidelines to begin in 2026 must prescribe only terms for spreading shortage around, not for rewriting the compact that gave California its share, or Imperial’s place within that share.
“There’s an established priority system,” Shields said, and that system favors Imperial irrigators.
For them and their workers and families, she said, this is not about power or greed. Without sufficient water, the Imperial Valley itself would dry up. Her daughter was among high school seniors awarded a scholarship at the board’s May meeting, and Shields said she wants her to have a future in the valley.
Without water, she said, “Our entire community would have to move away,” or some might rely on water trucks. “That’s a third-world country.”
The state and federal governments need to find new ways of working across borders to save water, Shields said. They can broaden the compact’s options for shortage-sharing without scrapping the compact’s core allocation system.
“There’s an old saying that the Law of the River is whatever we agree it can be,” Shields said.
Her willingness to consider temporary water concessions but not permanent reductions is shared by negotiators from other states.
Wyoming will participate in plans to temporarily reduce demand when it’s needed to fulfill the Upper Basin’s obligation to supply at least 7.5 million acrefeet to the Lower Basin on average, said Randy Bolgiano, a retired rancher who lives east of Pinedale and serves as the state’s alternate representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission.
What Wyoming won’t do is permanently reduce its share of the river, he said.
Bolgiano said he believes there’s little for his neighbors to do now but pray for snow and keep dealing with the restrictions that shriveling streams deliver them each year.
“We’re at the mercy of the gods,” he said, “and the gods are presently angry.”
Among major cities, Las Vegas is uniquely at risk from the Colorado River’s decline, because it is uniquely reliant upon the river. The region has no other sources besides a bit of groundwater, and takes 90% of its water from the river at Lake Mead. The compact also awarded Nevada by far the smallest share of the river — 300,000 acre-feet, or about a ninth of what Arizona gets — because few lived near or used the river there 100 years ago.
For that reason, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has been among the most conservative with its water during the drought, incentivizing grass removals and even backing a new state law that bans purely ornamental grass. This year the water provider wrote projections for an even smaller river than the drought years have so far averaged: 11 million acre-feet.
Such a low flow, if sustained over years, would upend life as millions of westerners know it. It would complicate the region’s efforts to reach consensus on shared cutback, when even stopping reservoir losses at the river’s average flow of 12.3 million since drought began has proven too much.
Las Vegas cannot afford to overestimate the river.
“What we are experiencing now is probably on the rosy side of what the next 100 years looks like,” said Colby Pellegrino, Southern Nevada’s deputy general manager of resources.
Recognizing that, the Las Vegas water provider sank $1.3 billion in a new, deeper Lake Mead water pipe and pump station over the last five years. It paid off this year the reservoir dipped low enough to leave an old pipe dry.
The Lower Basin will keep reducing its water use, Pellegrino said. But the river won’t stabilize if the Upper Basin doesn’t forget about fully developing the hypothetical “half ” that the compact negotiators awarded it in 1922, and even reduce some of its current use.
“There’s no way anyone in the basin should be dreaming about the (full) allocations that we have,” Pellegrino said.
Arizona’s state water chief said all of the states will struggle to curb their demands, but none will have a choice in the matter. One reality or another, the drying climate or some new federal mandate, will force them.
“We all need to recognize our future is as much conservation as we can possibly do,” said Buschatzke, Arizona’s Water Resources director.
That doesn’t mean the negotiations will throw out the 1922 allocations, he said. “I would be surprised if the next set of guidelines is constructed in a way that anyone gives up anything permanently.”
Udall, the climate scientist, said he believes federal officials will nonetheless alter the rules that currently tend to favor farmers over cities, likely by the end of this year. The goal would be to assure that cities will always have the water they need for health and safety.
“It has to happen,” said Udall, whose dad was an Arizona congressman and whose uncle was Interior secretary in the 1960s.
Pellegrino said she also expects the government to award a certain amount of guaranteed water to cities for health and safety.
The Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles accepts the scientific projections of a permanently smaller river, water resource manager Brad Coffey said. To prepare, the water supplier is investing in new water reuse projects, and is paying for seasonal fallowing on farms of the Bard Water District and the Quechan Tribe, both providers of irrigation water across the river and state line from Yuma.
“They win by irrigating for their most high-value (vegetables) in winter and spring, then they don’t plant a crop in the hot summer months,” Coffey said. Metropolitan banks the saved water in Lake Mead.
“Finding your favorite villain, whether it’s the farmer or it’s the city, it matters not. It’s not going to get us there.”
Pat Mulroy
Former Southern Nevada Water Authority chief
The water: How long will it last?
Johnston walked his rented Wyoming hayfields in June, tromping his rubber boots through mud and tracking old boards that had washed out of place on the ditch. Although he levels his fields to maximize water savings, the infrastructure that gets that water there is ancient.
“I don’t know how old these boards are,” he said. “I’ve been here 20 years and they were here when I got here.”
When he wants to remove them to let water gush through, he snags them with the barbed end of a pickaroon, a pole that loggers used to wrangle logs down river for making railroad ties in the old days.
Instead of using remote sensors to judge when it’s time to close off the flow to a field, he watches for blackbirds. When they gather at the opposite end, it means the water has reached them and pushed up bugs and seeds for them to eat. Time to reinsert the boards.
It’s low-tech farming when compared with the drip lines and electric pumps in Yuma or the Imperial Valley. But Johnston said his neighbors are more wasteful. They don’t tend their ditches as often, which can lead to water spilling into his and adding to his official allocation. Locals say increasing efficiency would dry up the town and its surrounding, because the saved water would flow downriver instead of seeping from farms to create wetlands.
“There’s some reasoning behind it,” he said, “but at the same time there’s blatant overuse and inefficiencies.”
Johnston’s cellphone rang while he walked a ditch. A horse stable in Florida had heard he grows high-quality hay, and wanted to place an order for delivery later in the year.
“I’m guessing because we’re pretty drought-stricken we won’t have any to send out of state,” he told the caller.
Woodhouse, the third-generation Yuma farmer now lobbying to keep his district’s share, can empathize. He has enjoyed visiting rural communities in Wyoming and elsewhere in the river basin, and has the pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and other hunting trophies on his shop wall to show it. Farmers in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado must feel conflicted about letting the water flow past them to supply others, he said.
“I can see where those folks might think, you know, the water came running off the mountains from the snowpack where they’re at, (and) that they’ve got their entitlements.”
With the river depleted, they’ll have to send enough to supply Arizona, Nevada and California first. At least, that’s how the system has always worked. At its core, the Law of the River compels those at the top of the river to supply those at the bottom with their share.
But Woodhouse and his Arizona and California farm neighbors know their grip on the river is also slipping with each foot that Lake Mead slides toward dead pool, when the river would stop flowing to their canals.
The Law of the River is due for a reality check, and everyone is waiting to see how the federal government bends it before it breaks.
Brandon Loomis