The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Friday that, over the next four months, it plans to hold back 350,000 acre-feet of water that would normally flow through Grand Canyon into Lake Mead.
Failure to act would result in Lake Powell reaching a critical elevation of 3,525 feet above sea level as early as next month, according to Wayne Pullan, the bureau’s Upper Colorado Basin regional director.
On Friday, the lake stood at 3,536 feet, only 11 feet above the threshold elevation and 164 feet below full pool, according to the. Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower turbines cannot be safely operated at elevations below 3,490 feet — the threshold elevation was set to with a 35-foot buffer. While the water year has gotten off to a promising start, November proved to be the basin’s second-driest on recording, resulting in a loss of 1.5 million acre-feet of inflow to Lake Powell compared to earlier projections, according to a the bureau’s announcement. Following December’s big storms, the Colorado’s upper basin snowpacks are presently 136% of average. A lot of that runoff would be captured in upstream reservoirs, which are also badly depleted, before reaching Lake Powell.
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