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The entire Colorado River system has been over-allocated for decades, according to water experts like Beckwith. “The drought has just hastened that reality,” he said.
“The Colorado River has been cut to death—all 5 trillion gallons a year drained, depleted, dried up,” says Gary Wockner, executive director of the nonprofit Save the Colorado. “The dams have devastated the river’s health and the former 2-million acre wetland in the Colorado River Delta is now a sand-duned wasteland.”
“The dropping water levels in Lake Mead are the condor in the coal mine—we must hear its voice,” says Wockner. “The health of the river and water supplies across the Southwest U.S. are continuing to decline. People are literally draining everything.”
There is serious concern that as water becomes increasingly scarce in the drought-stricken West, cooperation will break down and “lower-basin states would have to do a ‘call on the river,’ where the lower basin will have to legally demand that the water is sent down river,” says Wockner.
For now, Western states are working together to address the problem. “Major river users agreed last year to leave hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water in Lake Mead by 2017 that they would otherwise take,” reports The Arizona Republic.
Las Vegas and Phoenix, among other desert cities, have already made major cutbacks in their water use with Las Vegas decreasing water use by 30 percent in 10 years and Phoenix having reduced its overall water consumption by 27 percent in 20 years, despite both cities having some of the fastest growing populations in the U.S. Still, the two cities could be seeing even more curtailments since Arizona and Southern Nevada would get the biggest mandatory cuts should the Bureau of Reclamation announce a 2016 water shortage.
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