U.S. officials announced plans Tuesday that they characterized as extraordinary to keep hundreds of billions of gallons of water stored in a reservoir on the Utah-Arizona line to prevent it from shrinking more amid prolonged drought and climate change.
In this July 30, 2021, photo, a houseboat rests in a cove at Lake Powell near Page, Ariz.SALT LAKE CITY —
“We have never taken this step before in the Colorado River basin, but conditions we see today and the potential risks we see on the horizon demand that we take prompt action,” Trujillo said. There is less water flowing through the river than is consumed by cities and farms throughout the region. And the water levels in the river’s two primary storage reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — have plummeted substantially over the past two decades — to such an extent that boaters found a decades-old dead body in a barrel exposed on Sunday.
The decision injects uncertainty into the boating and recreation industries that rely on consistent reservoir levels to operate infrastructure like docks. And it forces officials to confront that without drastic conservation measures, demand for water in growing regions will likely come up against supply constraints in a hotter, drier future.
The request centered on the fact that keeping water stored in Lake Powell will decrease the amount of water flowing downstream to Lake Mead, the Colorado River’s other main storage reservoir.
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