West’s water shortage reaches historic levels
Widespread drought may affect food prices, worsen fires
PAGE, Ariz. – The 150-foot-tall white “bathtub” ring along the red rocks of Lake Powell is the first sign that something isn’t right.
Other signs are everywhere: Boat ramps high and dry. Rock arches emerging from decades-long submersion. Boat wrecks uncovered by the receding water. Vast mudflats where water once pooled.
Lake Powell, the nation’s secondlargest reservoir, is about 30% full and dropping, a water level not seen since the reservoir was first filled when the Glen Canyon Dam blocked up the Colorado River in 1963.
Two hundred miles downstream, the situation is almost identical at Lake Mead, the nation’s biggest reservoir: same bathtub ring, same dry boat ramps, same mudflats. The historically low levels prompted federal authorities to formally declare a water shortage for drought-stricken southwestern areas served by Lake Mead, cutting water supplies to Arizona by nearly 20% and 7% for Nevada.
The water shortages are signs of an increasingly dire and dry climate across the West. Experts said these conditions will lead to higher food prices across the country, bigger and hotter forest fires and lifestyle changes for tens of millions of Americans, who depend on the water to drink, irrigate their lawns and wash their cars.
Colorado River climate researcher Brad Udall was shocked to see water levels in Lake Powell have dropped 50 feet from a year ago. Udall has rafted down the Grand Canyon 45 times, giving him a water-level view of the Colorado River’s flow.
“I mean, you go to the boat ramps, and they just end, and in some cases, they’re nowhere near the water,” said Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. “You’ve got to go back to 1969 – six years into filling it – to find an equivalent level.”
Ten governors asked President Joe Biden to provide federal disaster funding for the West, parts of which have been in a drought for 22 years.
Lake Mead provides drinking water for 25 million people, from Phoenix to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The low water levels also could mean higher food costs for anyone who enjoys Colorado beef, California almonds or lettuce from Arizona.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, one of the 10 governors who sent the letter to Biden, said national solutions are needed, given the number of states affected. Noting that Colorado saw three of its largest wildfires last year, and California has seen several this year, Polis said smoke and ash from burning forests affect Midwestern and Eastern states.
Though water issues in the West have pitted states against each other over who is entitled to how much, Polis said it’s time for more regional and national cooperation. He said federal drought assistance would help farmers keep food in grocery stores, and federal engineers could help develop reservoirs to “bank” water, along with encouraging more efficient farming irrigation systems.
“Western states are tired of fighting like dogs over a shrinking pie,” Polis said. “We need to change the game.”
Though the West has both wet and dry spells, Udall said climate change is responsible for at least a third of the overall drop in rain and snow.
“It’s a lot warmer, it’s a lot drier,” Udall said. “Droughts are temporary. This is not temporary.”
Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom asked residents and businesses to curb water use by 15%, a request that was largely ignored this summer. The state backs a $100 million research effort to turn salty ocean water into water to drink and grow food.
California grows one-third of the country’s vegetables, and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, from nearly $5 billion in grapes to $2.7 billion worth of beef and more than $1 billion in tomatoes. Little of that agriculture would happen if the Colorado River didn’t provide irrigation water.
In Yuma, Arizona, farmer John Boelts, 44, said he’s thankful he’s got water enough to raise crops of spring and fall melons and lettuce over the winter. Yuma, the winter lettuce capital of the world, helps produce 90% of leafy greens in the U.S. during the winter months, even though it averages only 2.5 inches of rain annually.
To raise those crops, farmers such as Boelts, who co-owns the 2,000-acre Desert Premium Farms, depend heavily on water pulled from the Colorado River. He’s thankful that Lake Mead and Lake Powell have done their job of storing up water for farmers, but he worries what will happen if they run dry.
“If we didn’t have the dams and the storage, we’d have been toast a long time ago,” he said.
Boelts said Yuma-area farmers have increased production by 30% over the past several decades, while reducing their water use by 30%.
“The old adage that food grows where water flows is real,” he said. “We all live and die the same when the glass is less than half full.”
If farmers can’t grow as much because there’s not enough water to irrigate their crops, Americans will pay more for food or import more from foreign countries.
If water levels continue dropping, there won’t be enough water at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam or Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam to generate nonpolluting hydroelectricity for about 1 million homes across Nevada and California.
Mead’s generators have dropped to 66% of their usual output, and Lake Powell’s could stop entirely by January 2023 under a worst-case scenario projected by federal officials.
“One of the things we’re learning is that this is likely not a drought anymore. This is the new normal. And it’s moving east, creeping up and over east to Minnesota and Iowa,” said Taylor Hawes, 52, the Colorado River program director for the Nature Conservancy. “We are all going to have to tighten our belts to get through this.”
Hawes said long-term predictions indicate the West will get drier. She said southern Arizona may see unusually heavy rainfall when it isn’t needed and dry conditions when water would help most.
“Climate change is water change: too much, too little, the wrong time. And the situation in the West is a manifestation of our challenge with climate change,” she said. “It’s both a ripple effect and a compounding effect. Right now, you’ve got ranchers selling off their cattle because there’s no forage, no grass. They’re having to sell cattle off early, so we may see a glut of beef in the market now and a shortage in the future.”
Southern Arizona rancher Dwight Babcock usually sells off about 10% of his cattle each year. To survive last year’s drought, he winnowed deeper, selling off a third of the herd. Most became hamburgers, he said.
“When we’re missing the grass, we’re missing the feed,” said Babcock, 74. “As we got no rains last year of any consequences, we didn’t develop any grass in the summer months, which usually carries us through the rest of the year.”
Although heavy rains this summer swept through the Dragoon Mountains of Cochise County, where Babcock’s Three Sisters Land & Cattle ranch sits, the area about 70 miles southeast of Tucson remains in “moderate” drought.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials Heather Patno and Michael Bernado are responsible for helping predict water flows and for keeping water running down the Colorado River through the two reservoirs to irrigate farms and provide water for residents, along with hydroelectricity.
Patno, a hydraulic engineer who helps manage Lake Powell, worries that the loss of clean hydropower will raise electricity rates for potentially tens of thousands of people, but there’s little either can do but watch as snow and rainfall diminish and the soil gets drier, soaking up what little water does fall.
“We had this big savings account, and we’ve been depleting it,” said Bernado, the Lower Colorado Basin river operations manager who helps run Lake Mead.