The future of Lake Powell, including its recreation opportunities, is uncertain after years of decreasing water levels.Īlready, southern Nevada has spent $817 million to build a deeper tunnel under Lake Mead - a new "straw" into the reservoir - to keep water flowing to Las Vegas. Soon, the region’s accelerating aridification will force Page, like the vast irrigated farms and growing metropolises throughout the Southwest, to dig deeper for a solution.Ī houseboat is anchored on Clear Creek at Lake Powell on Aug. Its 7,500 residents and another 3,000 in Lechee will draw water from an emergency pipe link that federal officials are designing and connecting to tap deeper tunnels that allow managers to bypass the hydro powerplant when necessary or desired, such as for environmental flows downstream in Grand Canyon.Įven those tunnels are at risk of drying in coming years. One more dry winter, Hill predicted, and “shit gets real.” After trees, plants and parched soil took their share, this spring’s runoff was shaping up poorly again. Still, the intakes sat just 39 feet below a surface that already had fallen 148 feet since the same date in 2000. It was late May when Hill stood at his whiteboard, and snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains had started coursing down the Colorado to provide the storage pool a temporary, seasonal lift from its most recent record low. Page and neighboring Lechee get water from Lake Powell. Page and a neighboring Navajo Nation community, Lechee, get their water from those same intakes, constructed at an elevation that government dam builders in the 1950s and ‘60s expected to remain forever inundated.īryan Hill, general manager of Page Power & Water, draws the Glen Canyon Dam and Page's water supply issues on a whiteboard on May 25, 2022, in his office. If the snows that melt to replenish the reservoir are lower than expected this winter, the dam's managers warn, it's possible that water will dip below Glen Canyon Dam's hydropower intakes by the end of 2023. Further declines could lend momentum to a long-simmering clamor for moving most or all of Powell's stored water down to Mead. Hill's drawing showed a reservoir on the brink after two decades of aridification, holding less water than it is supposed to send downstream in the coming year. During dry spells, it could pour its excess through Grand Canyon and into Mead, supplying users downstream. Powell once seemed Mead's failsafe backup, a reservoir that, in a wet string of years, could accumulate far more than what the river delivers in a single year. Lake Mead's own decline threatens to upend a vast irrigated agricultural empire in Southern California and southwestern Arizona, and to restrict or eventually cut off a significant source of hydroelectricity and household water for the urban Southwest. If the lake keeps dropping below those generator intakes, dam managers will have difficulty pushing enough water downstream to keep Lake Mead from tanking and to satisfy the Southwest’s legal rights to water. That day’s line fell just 39 feet above a black one Hill had drawn to indicate the dam’s hydropower intakes, the point at which the last of 1,320-megawatts flickers off.Īs personal as the threat feels to Hill and his neighbors, his charts depicted a troubling reality for millions of other water users. He was updating a presentation he had created to reassure a worried City Council that it was merely time to act, not to panic. In his stylized drawing of Lake Powell, the surface lapped just above where he marked his town’s drinking water pipe, bringing the Colorado River drought crisis uncomfortably close to home.Īgainst a diagram of Glen Canyon Dam’s concrete arch, Bryan Hill used blue marker to ink progressively shallower water lines from 22 years of Southwestern drought and overuse: 3,700 feet above sea level when full. PAGE - At his office whiteboard on this dam town’s desert edge, the water utility manager recited the federal government’s latest measures of the colossal reservoir that lay 4 miles down the road, then scrawled an ominous sketch showing how far it has shrunk. As Lake Powell's water levels drop, Southwest water users, boaters, rafters and more are feeling the pinch and worrying about the lake's future.
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