Water managers along the Colorado River are looking for an amount of water equal to what the entire state of Utah has rights to in order to head off a water and power crisis across the West, they said Tuesday.
The hot, dry winter has forecasters predicting record-low flows down the West’s most important river even as states remain at odds over new rules to govern the waterway. The Trump administration’s Interior Department must make politically treacherous decisions over roughly the next month about how to operate its system of reservoirs and canals to deal with the dire conditions.
Speaking at a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission on Tuesday, Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart said the upstream states estimate an additional 1.7 million acre-feet of water will need to be added to Lake Powell to keep the water level there from falling below the hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation has said it will not let water levels fall below the turbines because of concerns that doing so could damage the dam, which sits on the river near the Arizona and Utah border.
But Gebhart acknowledged that the heat wave that plagued the region over the past two weeks could yet make the problem worse.
