Water levels are at historically low levels on Lake Powell on April 5, 2022 in Page, Arizona.
Rj Sangosti Medianews Group | Denver Post via Getty Images
The federal government said Tuesday it would postpone the release of water from one of Colorado’s major reservoirs, an unprecedented action that will temporarily tackle declining reservoir levels fueled by a historic drought in the West.
The solution will hold more water at Lake Powell, a reservoir located in Glen Canyon in northern Arizona, instead of releasing it downstream to Lake Mead, the other major reservoir of the river.
The action came when water levels in both reservoirs reached their lowest levels in history. Lake Powell’s water level is currently at 3,523 feet. If the level falls below 3,490 feet, the so-called minimum power pool, Glen Canyon Dam, which supplies electricity to about 5.8 million customers in the inner West, will no longer be able to generate electricity.
The delay is expected to protect the dam’s operations over the next 12 months, officials said during a press briefing on Tuesday and will retain nearly 500,000 acres of water in Lake Powell. Under a separate plan, employees will also release about 500,000 acres of water into Lake Powell from Flaming Gorge, a reservoir located upstream of the Utah-Wyoming border.
Officials said the actions would help save water, protect the dam’s ability to produce hydropower and give employees more time to figure out how to manage the dam at lower water levels.
“We have never taken this step in the Colorado Basin before,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tanya Trujillo told reporters on Tuesday. “But the conditions we see today, and what we see on the horizon, require us to take swift action.”
Federal officials last year ordered the first-ever water shutdown for the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to more than 40 million people and about 2.5 million acres of arable land in the West. The cuts have affected farmers in Arizona, who use nearly three-quarters of the water available to irrigate their crops.
In April, federal water managers warned the seven states that draw from the Colorado River that the government was considering urgent action to address declining water levels in Lake Powell.
Later that month, state officials sent a letter to the interior agreeing to the proposal and asking for a temporary reduction in Lake Powell’s emissions to be implemented without triggering further water outages in any of the states.
The mega-drought in the western United States has caused the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years, with conditions likely to last until 2022 and lasting for years. Researchers have estimated that 42% of the severity of the drought is due to man-made climate change.
“Our climate is changing, our actions are responsible for this, and we must take responsible action to respond,” Trujillo said. “We all need to work together to protect the resources we have and the dwindling water supplies in the Colorado River that our communities rely on.
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