Lake Mead, Nev.
Historic drought: Human skeletal remains were recovered from Lake Mead this week, as the country’s largest reservoir receded to historically low levels amid severe drought conditions and rising temperatures. Days earlier, boaters had found a barrel buried in mud that contained a corpse, likely from a 1980s gunshot victim, said police, who cautioned that more remains are likely to emerge. Lake Mead is part of the Colorado River basin, which provides water to more than 40 million people across seven Western states and parts of Mexico. The reservoir is at about 30 percent capacity, while Lake Powell, which also fills from the Colorado River, is at 24 percent capacity—the lowest since it was first filled. California’s two largest reservoirs, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, are at critically low levels just as the state enters its dry season.
California depends on heavy rainfall in March, but the state got just 1 inch of precipitation that month as temperatures were 3 degrees warmer than usual. Water use, meanwhile, jumped dramatically in March, as homeowners responded to the drought by watering their lawns earlier than usual, using the most water for the month since 2015. This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti asked residents and businesses to cut landscape watering from three days per week to two. The state relies on melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains, but snowpack was at just 27 percent of its historic average on April 1. Statewide, 20 percent of wells are reporting all-time-low water levels. Government officials expect 350,000 acres of Sacramento Valley farmland to be fallowed.