Water levels are at historic lows at Lake Powell on April 5, 2022 in Page, Arizona.
Rj Sangosti | Group Medianews | Post by Denver via Getty Images
The federal government on Tuesday announced it would delay the release of water from one of the Colorado River’s major reservoirs, an unprecedented action that will temporarily address a drop in reservoir water levels caused by a hurricane. historical drought in the West.
The decision will keep more water in Lake Powell, the reservoir located at Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, instead of discharging it downstream into Lake Mead, the river’s other major reservoir.
The actions came as water levels in both reservoirs reached their lowest levels on record. The water level of Lake Powell is currently at 3,523 feet. If the level drops below 3,490 feet, the so-called minimum energy pool, the Glen Canyon Dam, provides electricity for about 5.8 million customers in the inland west, it will no longer be able to generate electricity.
The delay is expected to preserve operations at the dam over the next 12 months and will keep nearly 500,000 acres of water in Lake Powell, officials said at a news conference Tuesday. Under a separate plan, officials will also discharge about 500,000 acres of water into Lake Powell from Volcanic Gorge, a reservoir located upstream on the Utah-Wyoming border.
The actions will help save water, protect the dam’s ability to produce hydroelectricity, and give officials more time to figure out how to operate the dam at lower water levels, officials said.
“We’ve never taken this step before in the Colorado Basin,” assistant Interior Secretary Tanya Trujillo told reporters Tuesday. “But the conditions that we see today, and what we see on the horizon, require us to act promptly.”
Last year’s federal official order to cut off the water for the first time for the Colorado River Basin, which provides water to more than 40 million people and about 2.5 million acres of arable land in the West. The cuts mostly affected farmers in Arizonapeople use almost three-quarters of the available water supply to irrigate their crops.
In April, federal water regulators warned seven states that draw from the Colorado River that the government was considering taking urgent action to address declining water levels at Lake Powell.
Later that month, representatives from the states sent a letter to the Department of the Interior agreeing with the proposal and requesting that temporary reductions in the amount of water released from Lake Powell be implemented without causing further water cuts in the area. any state.
Super-drought in the western United States has fueled driest two decades in the region for at least 1,200 years, with conditions likely to continue into 2022 and persist for many years. Researchers have estimated that 42 percent of drought severity is due to anthropogenic climate change.
“Our climate is changing, our actions are responsible for it, and we must act responsibly in response,” Trujillo said. “We all need to work together to protect the resources we have and the dwindling water supply in the Colorado River that our communities rely on.”
