Experts call for cutting water use

Researchers contend seven Western states need to address urgent crisis that’s deepening.

- By Ian JAMES

COLORADO River water flows in the Central Arizona Project aqueduct beside a Phoenix neighborhood.

The Colorado River's massive reservoirs are now so depleted that another dry year could send them plunging to dangerously low levels, a group of prominent scholars warns in a new analysis.

The researchers are urging the Trump administration to intervene and impose substantial cutbacks in water use across the seven states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

“We've got a real problem, and we ought to deal with it sooner rather than later,” said Jack Schmidt, director of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies, who coauthored the analysis. “Everybody needs to be looking at ways to cut right now.”

The Colorado River provides water for cities from Denver to San Diego, 30 Native tribes and farming communities from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico.

The river has long been overused, and its reservoirs have declined dramatically amid persistent dry conditions since 2000. Research has shown that the warming climate, driven largely by the use of fossil fuels, has intensified the long stretch of mostly dry years.

A meager snowpack in the Rocky Mountains last winter added to the strains on the river. The researchers analyzed the latest federal data and found that if the coming winter is just as dry, the river’s major reservoirs would approach critically low levels unless there are major reductions in water usage.

“The results are grim,” the experts wrote in the report, which was released Thursday. If next year turns out to be a repeat of this year, they wrote, total water use would exceed the river's natural flow by at least 3.6 million acre feet — nearly as much as California used in all last year.