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Nevada also will lose water - about 8% of its supply - but most residents will not feel the effects because the state recycles the majority of its water used indoors and doesn’t use its full allocation. “It kind of changes my thinking about how much longer I’m going to continue to farm,” Ollerton said. The cuts announced Tuesday could further squeeze those cities, raising questions about whether they will share with farmers next year. This year, Ollerton grew only half of what he had grown previously. Arizona farmers already lost much of their Colorado River water during prior cuts, but they were compensated with water through deals with cities like Phoenix and Tucson. Paco Ollerton, a Phoenix-area cotton farmer, worries that deeper cuts could jeopardize his water next year. The effect of the cuts on farmers remains unclear, but many fear more cuts will further inflame tensions between cities and agriculture, which uses more than 70% of the basin’s water. “We need California to participate we can’t do this alone with just Arizona and Nevada,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Phoenix, for example, will rely more heavily on the in-state Salt and Verde rivers, while directing less of its supply to recharge its groundwater aquifers.Īrizona officials blasted neighboring states that haven’t proposed cuts even as Arizona implements its own.Īrizona and Nevada came up with a plan for cuts that would have been close to proportional to water use, but both California and the Bureau of Reclamation rejected that deal, state officials said. Rather than ration water, mandate conservation or limit development, the cities will likely shift reliance to other sources. Officials in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been reluctant to propose more draconian water-rationing measures or limits on development. The water level at Lake Mead, the nation’s largest man-made reservoir, has plummeted so low that it’s currently less than a quarter full and inching dangerously close to a point where not enough water would flow to produce hydroelectric power at the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border. Residents of growing cities have been subjected to conservation measures such as limits on grass lawns.īut those efforts thus far haven’t been enough.
Some of the region’s farmers have been paid to leave their fields fallow. She was noncommittal on Tuesday about whether she planned to impose those cuts unilaterally if the states cannot reach agreement.įor years, cities and farms have diverted more water from the river than flows through it, depleting its reservoirs and raising questions about how it will be divided as water becomes more scarce.Īfter more than two decades of drought, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico were hit with mandatory cuts for the first time last year. Touton has said a 15% to 30% reduction is necessary to ensure that water deliveries and hydroelectric power production are not disrupted. Together, the missed deadline and the latest cuts put officials responsible for providing water to cities and farms under renewed pressure to plan for a hotter, drier future and a growing population. “The states collectively have not identified and adopted specific actions of sufficient magnitude that would stabilize the system,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said.
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Because the states failed to meet a federal deadline to figure out how to cut their water use by at least 15%, they could see even deeper cuts that the government has said are needed to prevent reservoirs from falling so low they cannot be pumped. Mexico will also face cuts.īut those reductions represent just a fraction of the potential pain to come for the 40 million Americans in seven states that rely on the river.
Though the cuts will not result in any immediate new restrictions - like banning lawn watering or car washing - they signal that unpopular decisions about how to reduce consumption are on the horizon, including whether to prioritize growing cities or agricultural areas.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - For the second year in a row, Arizona and Nevada will face cuts in the amount of water they can draw from the Colorado River as the West endures more drought, federal officials announced Tuesday.
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