Lake Powell, the 25 million acre-foot reservoir formed by Glen Canyon Dam in 1968, is now less than half full.
It’s not a philosophical question about the reservoir being half empty or half full. It didn’t fill up last year. Since the drought of 2002, it’s draining faster than it’s filling. While water experts admit there are lot of “ifs” in their calculations, they are beginning to get concerned. Eagle County’s Eagle River is a tributary of the Colorado River.
If the drought, now in its third year, continues at current rates -and forecasts vary – the huge lake could be drained by 2010, leaving Colorado to supply 7.5 million acre-feet it agreed to supply downstream states under the 1922 Colorado River Interstate Compact.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Sad. And it was such a nice place, too. Maybe we can build the new Manhattan on the dry lakebed.
A bit O/T, but apropos here.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 was a classic case of “science” in the service of a political outcome, along with a full measure of power politics.
The measure called for the upper basin states (CO, WY, UT, and NM) to spilt the annual flow 50/50 with the lower basin states (AZ, NV, and CA). CA was clearly the big player because they had all the population at that time (and the congressional representatives).
So rather than writing the legislation as a 50/50 split, the lower basin states were instead guaranteed 7.5 million acre-feet (at the urging/insistence of CA)
It turned out (wouldn’t you know?) that the average annual flow was much closer to 11 million acre-feet, not 15 million as implied by the Compact.
Carbon credits/offsets operate under similar Three-card Monte rules
I guess they’re less concerned now.. or at least should be. Out of interest, here’s a nice graph:
http://www.riverlakes.com/pdf/Lake%20Powell%20Elevation%20History2.pdf
Unfortunately it doesn’t have the last 3 years.
Steven:
You folks in Colorado better start doing a lot of rain dances to provide down stream regions the promised water.
We have had more than 50% of our annual rainfall in the last 60 days.
The people out west thank you for the rain dance! It could not be natural variations so it must be human caused!