The Colorado River runs out of water. The Biden administration maintains that no more time can be lost, in the absence of agreements between the states that depend on that flow.
In an unparalleled plan, the Department of the Interior launched a proposal on Tuesday to save what remains of the Colorado and this even considers cutting allocations and reducing the water received by California, Arizona and Nevada by a quarter to prevent the reservoirs from emptying.
A cut of this relevance and the fact that it is the federal government that can adopt a measure of this magnitude are things that have never happened in the history of the United States, the experts stressed.
But the situation begins to be more than alarming. The flow of the river has recently been reduced, after a prolonged drought, by a third compared to historical measurements. The Colorado supplies water for human consumption to some 40 million people, as well as to two Mexican states, is crucial for some 30 Native American tribes, and facilitates the irrigation of more than 2.2 million hectares.
Electricity generated by the nation's two largest dams, on Lake Mead and Lake Powell, is distributed to millions of homes and businesses. Right now, however, the Mead and Powell have such low water levels that the turbines that generate that electricity could soon be idle.
If it continues to dry up, the river could reach that situation called a dead bed, in which the water does not flow. And this is the serious circumstance that the US government wants to avoid at all costs due to the repercussions that this would cause.
Faced with the political and ethical dilemma about the depth of the cut, the Department of the Interior, in charge of managing the river, released a draft in which it proposes three possible scenarios.
The first of these options does not involve federal intervention and relies on the states that use Colorado's water to avoid that dead channel and the drop in energy production, an agreement they have so far been unable to reach.
The other alternative concerns the amount of water released by the Glen Canyon Dam, which would be reduced based on water rights. This would mean fewer restrictions for California, which has the most rights, and more stringent ones for Arizona and Nevada.
The third possibility proposes power cuts with the same percentage for the states, which suggests that it would lead to a legal challenge from California, but would avoid worse consequences for the other two states and for the tribes, which can have serious problems in a situation of big restrictions.
This project document discusses measures that can serve to protect operational management from "unprecedented hydraulic conditions" while providing an equitable supply from the Colorado River system.
"Failure is not an option," Tommy Beaudreau, the undersecretary of the Interior, said in a statement. After acknowledging the worsening situation generated by the drought, he insisted that measures must be taken to protect the stability and sustainability of the Colorado. The lack of rain has been complicating the conditions of its cause for two decades, although in the last two years the impact has been even greater. At the Mead and at the Powell, human corpses in jerry cans have even come to light.
