Painful Colorado River cuts are coming, whether basin states agree or not

The window to avoid even more painful cuts on the Colorado River just slammed shut.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation is asking states to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water, just to keep Lake Powell and Lake Mead out of critically low territory in 2023.

And maintain those cuts for at least the next several years. If we don’t hit these targeted levels each year, it will mean even deeper cuts in later years.

And we’ll need a plan to do all of this by mid-August when shortage levels and other important operating details for the next water year are set.

Guess how difficult that’s going to be?

Colorado River users have about 8 weeks to decide

We’re talking a mind-boggling amount of water.

That’s roughly 650 billion to 1.3 trillion gallons – enough to flood 1.5 million to 3 million football fields with a foot of water. Or enough to take the average shower nearly 38 to 76 billion times.

If we were to carry out every cut contemplated in the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan, which applies to Arizona, California and Nevada, that would amount to 1.1 million acre-feet of water.

That means the full basin would need to conserve at least twice as much as the deepest levels of shortage for which our three states have planned. In the best-case scenario.

And we’ll need to agree on a plan to do so in about eight weeks – or else, the feds will act for us. Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton made that clear during a June 14 Senate hearing on drought.

Finding this much water will be tough

That’s going to be tough, considering that the Lower Basin has only met about half of this year’s target under the 500-plus plan, which calls for the three states to voluntarily save 500,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead, over and above what we are mandated to cut, each year through 2026.

Most of what has been saved so far this year has come from tribes, cities and farmers in Arizona.

California is not yet mandated to cut its use, so it has instead decided to take its full allocation this year, plus withdraw some of the water it had previously volunteered to store in Lake Mead, to help cushion the blow of a severely curtailed State Water Project.

Meanwhile, the Upper Basin has not agreed to a plan to temporarily curtail use among states. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico have been talking about conservation and demand management ideas for years, including paying folks not to use water, but have never reached consensus.

That’s not an attempt to point fingers or complain about how we got into this mess – neither of which changes anything.

The best we can hope for now is agreement among the states, without federal coercion or litigation.

Arizona can't shoulder all of those cuts

Arizona water director Tom Buschatzke said in a statement that “we in Arizona and water users across the basin need to do more to protect the system. Again, we will do whatever it takes.”

But what might that look like?

Good question.

Arizona has junior water rights on the river, which means technically, we are first in line for cuts. But Arizona’s annual appropriation is 2.8 million acre-feet, and this year we’re only using about 2 million acre-feet of it. The rest is already in Lake Mead, in the form of mandatory cuts and voluntary savings.

If the full basin is supposed to save up to 4 million acre-feet, relying on Arizona alone won’t get us there. And fully cutting the 2 million acre-feet we are using would have devastating consequences.

The Central Arizona Project would dry up; no water would flow through its canals to metro Phoenix and Tucson. That might not immediately shut off taps in cities like Phoenix and Tempe, but it certainly would put the other sources on which they rely – renewable supplies from the Salt and Verde rivers and a finite pool of groundwater – under considerably more stress.

Zeroing out Arizona’s Colorado River allocation also would severely impact Yuma farmers, which supply the nation with veggies and salad greens in the winter.

Everyone is going to have to pitch in

That’s not to suggest that Arizona is the only one making sacrifices, nor should it take us off the hook to participate in this latest effort to save the nation’s two largest reservoirs.

Our cities and farmers must make do with even less water than they were expecting, and a lot sooner than they were planning for it.

But so must every other state and user that relies on the Colorado River. 

It must be noted that saving 2 million to 4 million acre-feet next year won’t rebuild Lake Mead or Lake Powell; it just keeps them from falling to the point where hydropower can no longer be generated.

This is not a solution. It’s not even a Band-Aid. It’s emergency surgery to stop the hemorrhaging, with the prognosis of the patient to be decided later.

Yes, maybe we should have heeded the warnings about our health decades ago, so we didn’t end up on the operating table. But we’re all here now, and we better make the most of it.

Reach Allhands at joanna.allhands@arizonarepublic.com. On Twitter: @joannaallhands.

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