Lake mead 60 day deadline by dept of Reclamation to restore water levels
Jun 30, 2022 The Dept of reclamation has issued an august deadline to come up with a conservation Solution between the 7 Upper and lower basin states or the Fed Government Threatens to step it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLMVXM-_7Rw
They are consuming too much water and are unable to conserve it, the feds just stepped in (Bureau of Reclamation) and have threatened a 60 day deadline for the upper states of the Colorado River to come up with a solution. Will they do anything? Probably not, and there goes water & power for California, etc from the Hoover Dam.
See my previous post about the water levels. See how close it is to not being able to get any at all. Have an image with it of when it was constructed, 20 years ago, and today
I was thinking, the dam goes across a canyon, which means the cross section of the lake perpendicular to the length is V-shaped. Thus when it was full, the surface area was large. Also there was more rain and runoff. The amount of water that could disappear without much notice was actually much larger than the amount which could disappear now, because it isn't like a straight-sided bathtub draining. Two feet off the top when the lake was full would be far more water than two feet starting from twenty feet down, because of the slanting sides. The lower it goes, the faster the remaining water goes. This could have been thought of sooner. However, after looking at maps of the watershed in Colorado and seeing how much bigger it was than I thought, I'm wondering about the water there. Has downstream usage grown that much? Is their snowfall greatly reduced, and if so, for how long?
Apparently they have not had a lot of snowfall. Not sure on the timeframe of that. Water usage is out of control, people trying to grow grass in a desert and having to water it every day for it to stay alive. Just doesn’t seem natural because of the rapid decline of the past 2 years though.
I'm with you on the water usage. I think it is just sheer numbers. The City of Phoenix has this optimistic page about how per capita use is down, but they obfuscate the total usage by saying there are 1.5 million people in Phoenix. https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/yourwater/historicaluse Yes, in the city limits, but we are surrounded by a lot of other little cities. There are 4 million people just in Maricopa County. You could take the City's per capita use and multiply that by about 4 (for the other counties drawing mainly from the Colorado) and have a better idea of the actual use. Agricultural use is mostly irrigation from the CAP. Their excess is dumped at the end of the line in the desert, where it is building up an aquifer, but it's coming from the river.
I also believe the less snowfall part, because we have had fewer storms too. It really is dry all over, just when everyone decided to move to a warm climate, and it isn't the result of a few planes spraying anything, no matter how much people want to believe in the butterfly effect. This covers hundreds of thousands of square miles. It might be related to a lot of commercial jets putting out their stuff though. It seems a tad cleaner and cooler now that there are noticeably fewer flights. It might also be related to the fact that these big cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas are heat islands, an effect no one knew about when the cities were being developed nor did they plan ways to reduce it. The result is that storms tend to wither and go around the populated areas and the cities get hotter and the residents want more swimming pools and iced tea. We have had two thunderstorms in the last two weeks that were the way I remember them being from 20 years or more ago. If we had them weekly like then it wouldn't be necessary to water the grass, which is mostly Bermuda grass and will survive anything.