People have been warning about the breakdown of the Colorado River for decades. It's now at a tipping point. Today, we kick off our six-part special on this vital source of water for the American Southwest.
The Colorado River is the water lifeline for tens of millions of people across the American Southwest, which couldn’t have developed the way it is today without it. But all the damming and diversion done to the Colorado has put it at a tipping point where a future with no water is no longer just fantasy but perilously possible.
Today, “The Times” kicks off “a six-part special on the future of this vital waterway. New episodes will publish every Friday through Feb. 10. Follow the project here. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times water reporter Ian James
More reading:
They sounded alarms about a coming Colorado River crisis. But warnings went unheeded
Sound ID: The transition that has taken place in the Colorado River Basin is astounding. The Colorado River Basin is in its 23rd year of a historic drought. Let's be clear up front, the prolonged drought is one of the most significant challenges facing our communities and our country. Both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at historically low levels.
Sound ID: We're going to have to make some hard choices. We really have to think big because we're gonna have to create a new regulatory framework. This is the unprecedented challenge that we face. And without action, we cannot protect the system and the millions of Americans who rely on this critical resource.
Sound ID: This is a full-on five-alarm fire going on right now, and the worst is yet to come.
Gustavo Arellano: After decades of repeated warnings, the Colorado River has reached a tipping point. Now the seven Western states that make up the Colorado River Basin need to cut about a quarter of the water that they use from it. And quickly. The water supply for millions of people in the West, where a big part of the country's food stock comes from, is at stake. It's a doomsday scenario, talked and written about for decades, and it's now here.
Gustavo Arellano: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to the Times Essential News from the L.A. Times. It's Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Today in the first of a six-part series on the Colorado River: how our greed has pushed this vital resource to a breaking point and how life as we know it in the American West is about to drastically change.
Gustavo Arellano: Taking us on this journey down the Colorado River is my L.A. Times colleague and resident water reporter, Ian James. Ian, welcome to The Times.
Ian James: Thanks, Gustavo.
Gustavo Arellano: So we've been hearing alarming things for decades about the shrinking water supply in the American West, but especially the water that comes from the Colorado River. What's the latest?
Ian James: That's right. It's a real crisis right now. The situation on the river has continued to get worse and worse.
Ian James: Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are the country's two largest reservoirs, are at their lowest levels since they were filled.
AP: Lake Mead is currently less than a quarter full,
Ian James: and they continue to go down.
AP: Federal officials are projecting historically low waters levels in the Western U.S. over the coming months.
Ian James: The water level has gotten so low that dead bodies that were thrown into Lake Mead years ago have been resurfacing,
AP: A decomposed body in a barrel was spotted by boaters. The man had been shot. His shoes put the killing between the mid-1970s and early 1980s.
Ian James: Meanwhile…in Arizona, farmers have been cutting back the amount of water they're able to use.
AP: Federal officials plan to tell several Western states how much more they'll have to cut back in water usage because of less water flowing through the Colorado River.
Ian James: and there are plans in Southern California to start rationing water by April of this year.
News Clip: This drought doesn't end.
Ian James: So it's just a situation that continues to get worse. The federal government has been trying to step in and tell the seven states that get water from the river that they're going to need to cut back very quickly.
Gustavo Arellano: Geez, how did we get to this point? Like what's driving this crisis?
Ian James: One is just chronic overuse of the water. The reservoirs on the river can hold multiple years of water. They're actually very large reservoirs, but they've been drawn down over the past two decades. And going back a century, the agreements that divided up the river handed out way more water than was available.
Ian James: And now the hotter drier climate is adding to that disconnect between what's available and what's being promised, what's being given out. And so it's two big things: chronic overuse of the water and the other is the effects of climate change.
Ian James: It boils down to simple math. It's taking out more than what's going in.
Gustavo Arellano: Addition, subtraction.
Ian James: Exactly. And so what that means is, there will need to be major changes in how this region uses the river.
Gustavo Arellano: I've been hearing about problems with the Colorado River for basically my entire life. I'm sure you have too. So what motivated you to really start paying attention to it?
Ian James: Yeah. I've been reporting on the problems of the Colorado River for years, and it's just in the past year, it's gotten so much more serious. And I had the idea to travel to different places along the river and look really deeply at why this matters, how it's affecting people now, and what may be coming as this serious shortage really spreads out across the landscape and affects how we live.
Gustavo Arellano: So where did you go and who did you meet?
Ian James: We traveled all over the place.
Ian James: We visited the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
Wendy thompson: You know everyone knows that we’re dry.
Ian James: We talked with farmers and ranchers there.
Wendy thompson: This is where it starts.
Ian James: We went to Lake Powell in Utah.
John: This is pretty gnarly. Yeah.
Ian James: And went up river with John Weisheit, who is an environmental activist and a river guide.
John: I mean, I don't know if I'm willing to, uh, flip a boat for, for this
Ian James: We went to the Imperial Valley and talked with farmers.
Ian James: What are we seeing here?
Ben Abatti: So we're germinating, uh, some basil so our fall basil.
Ian James: We went to Las Vegas and talked with people who are seeing grass removed.
Clip: You know, we are called water waste investigators, so that's pretty much exactly the job.
Ian James: We went to the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation and talked with leaders of the tribe about how they view the river.
Linda Otero: It’s who we are…never forget that, never sever from it.
Ian James: And we also went to Mexico where we spoke with environmental activists and farmers and people who rely on fishing.
Tape translation: I'm gonna try and not lose my phone in the water.
Ian James: These are people who are seeing up close, how rapidly this river has changed, but also how these problems have been building for a really long time. And, they're worried about how this river is drying up and they're looking for what may be solutions.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah. It makes sense that the people that you interviewed would be really concerned about the crises ‘cause they're working day to day on that particular issue. But how does the drying of the Colorado River affect everyone else who might not live close to the river or even see it very often. Like what's the scale of how we use the Colorado River?
Ian James: It's a major water source all the way from Denver to San Diego.
Seven Western states depend in all on it. It's Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California. Agriculture uses the biggest share by far, about 80% of the flow of the river…and the river also supplies big cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Ian James: Altogether it's about 40 million people who get water from the Colorado River, and it also is used to produce all sorts of crops, including 90% of the country's winter vegetables.
Gustavo Arellano: So basically the modern American West wouldn't exist without the river in other words.
Ian James: Exactly
Gustavo Arellano: So how close are we to jeopardizing the way that people live out here?
Ian James: I would say the river is really at a critical point, a tipping point, and everyone who's looking closely at it is talking about how we need to adapt to a smaller river, and it needs to happen very quickly. Some people I talk to describe it as the river is dying.
Gustavo Arellano: Coming up after the break, what people are doing to solve this crisis and what's getting in the way.
Gustavo Arellano: Ian, you mentioned that we're reaching a tipping point for the Colorado River, this huge life source for the West. How long have people been messing with it?
Ian James: This has been a long time coming. I mean, really, the history of the river has been shaped by monumental efforts by people to control and exploit its waters.
Ian James: In 1922, the seven states got together in New Mexico and signed this agreement to divide the water of the Colorado River.
Brad Udall: There were seven different state representatives. There was a federal representative who was Herbert Hoover, actually, at the time, and through the course of a year they came up with a way to allocate the waters of the Colorado River and it took them multiple meetings in many different places.
Ian James: I called up Brad Udall, who's a climate scientist at Colorado State University and he explained some of the history.
Brad Udall: The idea that seven states could agree on water use through an interstate compact was the idea of uh, Delph Carpenter, the Colorado River representative to the compact process.
Ian James: The 1922 Colorado River Compact set aside 7.5 million acre-feet for the upper basin and 7.5 million acre-feet for the lower basin.
Brad Udall: At first glance, that's what it did. It carved up the shares of the water into an upper base and lower basin.
Ian James: It's something of an artificial construct,
Ian James: but this dividing line is at Lee's Ferry in Arizona, which is located downstream of Glen Canyon Dam and upstream of the Grand Canyon.
Ian James: The states in the upper basin include Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. And the lower basin states include Arizona, Nevada and California.
Ian James: Each state had an amount of water allotted,
Ian James: And there have been some disagreements since then that have been sorted out in court, such as the Arizona versus California case in the 1960s. But that is the agreement that along with various other agreements, governs how much each state can take from the river.
Brad Udall: It also carved ou, an allocation for Mexico, but not numerically. It just said, here's where that water will come from if a treaty with Mexico occurs.
Ian James: When the states signed the Colorado River Compact in 1922, Mexico wasn't involved. Mexico secured its water allotment in 1944 under a separate treaty agreement with the U.S. government, and that has been in place ever since. Mexico gets 1.5 million acre-feet.
Brad Udall: And so we're now in the 100th anniversary of the compact. It is a document that's very short, it fits on about four pages.
Ian James: And also tribes weren't part of that discussion at all.
Brad Udall: It's a obviously a super important document, but is showing its age right now.
Ian James: Even when the compact was signed, there were some people who warned that there wouldn't be enough water for all the demands placed upon it. And those warnings grew louder as the years went on, but especially in the last two decades as the river has shrunk dramatically during this megadrought.
Gustavo Arellano: But now it's not just a problem of the states using too much water, right? Or just getting too much water out of it. You mentioned earlier climate change.
Ian James: That's right. The average temperatures across the upper part of the watershed have risen a lot. And if you look back to 1970, the average temperature has risen about 3 degrees.
Brad Udall: I like to say and have said for years, climate change is water change. If you add heat to the Earth like we're doing in spades right now, you're gonna fundamentally change the water cycle. And we have known this for literally decades.
Ian James: So starting around 2000, Lake Mead was nearly full and then major drought hit and it hasn't let up since. The scientists who look closely at it say a big driver of this dryness has been the higher temperatures from climate change.
Brad Udall: You get a whole litany of problems that come via the water cycle when you heat the planet.
Ian James: Brad Udall and other climate scientists talk about this as aridification, a progressive drying of the West.
Brad Udall:What we've seen since the year 2000 is now a 20% decline in flow.
Ian James: Basically, as fossil fuels are burned, and as the climate heats up, that's supercharging the droughts. And so the drought that we're now in the past 23 years has been one of the driest periods in centuries. And the science shows that it has become significantly worse because of all the heating.
Brad Udall: You know, the old saying, nature bats last is about to come true here. If we don't act to cut these demands down to exactly what nature is supplying.
Ian James: And so basically that's made the crisis on the river that much worse. That we're overusing a resource that is diminishing.
Gustavo Arellano: So what's the biggest concern right now, then, with the Colorado River?
Ian James: Well, if things go as they are, and if water use doesn't get reduced, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two major reservoirs that are filled by the river, may be in trouble. The water levels could keep going down to levels that are really basically the bottom of the bucket.
Gustavo Arellano: And if that happens, what happens?
Ian James: Potentially deadpool.
Gustavo Arellano: Deadpool, the Marvel character, the funny one?
Ian James: Yeah, exactly. But less fun to watch. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, they're now almost three-fourths empty, and if water levels keep going down, there is a risk of eventually reaching deadpool.
Gustavo Arellano: So where does that term even come from?
Ian James: I don't know exactly where it came from, but I think the people who manage the dams know that that is something that they definitely want to avoid because getting to that point would mean no water passing through the dams anymore downstream. And it would mean that we couldn't get any water out of the reservoirs whatsoever for California, Arizona and Mexico. It basically means running out of water. And in fact, the latest federal projections show there is a risk that Lake Mead could reach deadpool as soon as 2025.
Gustavo Arellano: Wow. That all sounds really bad. What's being done then to avoid reaching this so-called deadpool?
Ian James: The federal government is trying to increase the pressure on the seven states to scale back water use in a big way. And they've told the states to come up with plans to reduce water use by 2 to 4 million acre-feet, which turns out to be about 15 to 30% of the water that's used. So it's a huge reduction, and the federal government has been trying to increase the pressure on the states for them to act.
Gustavo Arellano: So how's it going right now? Are the states making any progress in making these cuts?
Ian James: There actually have been some cuts made already under previous agreements. And in part of Arizona farmers are already dealing with losing their water supply from the river. The reductions in Arizona are set to get even bigger this year. But still, the falling reservoir levels mean that bigger cuts are needed throughout the region.
Ian James: And at the same time, growth is continuing to happen in areas that depend heavily on water from the Colorado River.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, every time I pass through Phoenix and the suburbs around it… They seem to be getting more and more houses. There's this Holiday Inn Express that I stay in, I think in Buckeye, which is a city right on the outskirts of Phoenix on the west part, and I remember that when I used to look out, it was all basically desert and the 10. Last time I was there.…I started seeing them getting ready to make all of that into houses.
Ian James: Exactly. It's one of the fastest growing parts of the country. And that growth has continued over the past couple of decades. Phoenix and the surrounding suburbs get a large share of their water from the Colorado River. but they have to make big cuts. And there are people who are asking at what point should this start to affect all the growth that's happening?
Kathy Ferris: Hi. Hello.
Clip: What, what is this?
Ian James: And one of the people I talked with about this is Kathy Ferris, who's a former director of Arizona's Department of Water Resources.
Clip: What are we looking at here?
Kathy Ferris: We're, we're looking at the C-A-P canal, the Central Arizona Project Canal, and this is the canal that brings water all the way from the Colorado River to central Arizona and finds its way ultimately down to Tucson.
Ian James: And we met at one of these suburbs that's growing really rapidly. Buckeye.
Kathy Ferris: This is maybe meant to look like Mexico City. I don't know? Mm-hmm. La Condesa.
Ian James: Buckeye has plans to triple in population by 2030, but Kathy is concerned that in this part of the state, there doesn't seem to be enough water for all the growth that's planned.
Kathy Ferris: It's kind of like a movie set. It's more of a neighborhood than a lot of Arizona communities. It's like houses built around common areas.
Ian James: I used to live in Phoenix, so it's very familiar to me. I wanted to go back to see basically these areas that have been growing really rapidly and is the water shortage starting to affect growth at all? And what we saw was lots of construction happening, new developments going in, golf courses, flowing fountains.
Kathy Ferris: It doesn't feel like Arizona.
Ian James: The shade is the really nice part of this.
Ian James: Basically it doesn't seem like the shortage on the Colorado River is having a big effect yet in terms of holding back the growth in the desert.
Gustavo Arellano: OK, so all this development's happening despite the Colorado River shrinking. So where is Arizona planning to get its water from?
Ian James: Arizona is looking to pump more groundwater and that really worries Kathy.
Kathy Ferris: We've been kind of warning about this groundwater thing now for a few decades too.
Kathy Ferris: And it doesn't feel like people are paying attention.
Ian James: A lot of growth is happening under this accounting system where growth can happen in areas that depend on groundwater as long as water is being replenished from the Colorado River elsewhere from the C-A-P Canal, the Central Arizona Project Canal, the problem is there's less water flowing in now, but those demands to continue growing and pumping groundwater in these areas on the periphery of the Phoenix area, those pressures are not going away and so she's concerned that it won't be sustainable in the long run to rely more and more on groundwater in the desert.
Kathy Ferris: It's just easier to keep going like we've been going. But if we do that and we haven't planned for it, then the shortages will be abrupt and they will be disastrous. They will affect human life and industry and businesses. I think we can’t continue to allow everyone to have what they want.
Gustavo Arellano: More after the break.
Gustavo Arellano: Ian, you mentioned earlier about some of the proposals that the government, federal government, is giving the state in terms of using Colorado River water. So where are they right now in terms of negotiation? In other words, are the states gonna say, ‘Yeah, we're gonna go with what you have to say’?
Ian James: I don't think anyone knows right now. The negotiations among the states have been tense and acrimonious. There's been some finger pointing. Some states have said that California needs to do more. At the same time, there are also tribes that are asking to be more involved in the process of talking about how the water is used.... It looks difficult at this point. It looks like what might happen is the states would agree to reduce water use by some amount, and the federal government also would take other actions to reign in water use and reduce the amount of water that’s being released from the reservoirs. Altogether that adds up to a picture of everyone being forced to use quite a bit less, and the question that hasn't really been worked out yet is where are those cuts going to fall the hardest, and how is it going to work?
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah. No one wants their water cut, especially since their entire existence. They haven't had to do this much, especially not at the levels that the federal government wants. But what happens if all these states, if these tribes, everyone involved in the Colorado River, they don't get their act together and act quick?
Ian James: Yeah, it's a terrifying scenario. I asked Brad Udall, the climate scientist, and he made the point that everything is connected.
Brad Udall: If one thing goes wrong here, there's all these other ripple effects. You know, sometimes I think we just get so insulated. and we kinda have a failure of imagination on how bad things could get, right.
Ian James: Hitting deadpool at Lake Mead would be catastrophic.
Brad Udall: You run the risk of no refilling of Lake Mead. That means, in theory, a city of 2 million people, Las Vegas, has 90% of their water at at risk, and then obviously no water outta Hoover Dam. So no water into central Arizona, no water into the L.A. Basin.
Ian James: It would be a disaster unlike anything we've ever seen in the Southwest.
Brad Udall: No water for Mexico. I mean, you could quickly end up in a really ugly place and we need not to have a failure of imagination on how bad it could get.
Ian James: Entire farming areas in California, like the Imperial Valley, the Palo Verde Valley would dry up because the Colorado River is their only source of water.
Brad Udall: I'm always amazed the number of people that somehow think the world can go to hell, and yet they can still go down to Safeway and get their groceries. They don't make the connection that we're all interconnected
Ian James: There is concern that if the cuts aren't made and quickly that Lake Mead could continue to decline and ultimately crash.
Brad Udall: Why we would ever blunder into that is beyond me.
Gustavo Arellano:Yeah. No, this is all terrifying. But Ian, you talked to the experts, you spoke about what the government's doing. Did you talk to regular people who know what's going on? Who might be concerned?
Ian James: While I was working on this story, I traveled to the Green River in Utah to meet a group of students from Utah State University. They were camping by the Green River as part of their class on the Colorado River.
Jack Schmidt: Yeah. Pass around… Uh, we got cookies here.
Ian James: It was interesting to hear their perspectives as well as their professor Jack Schmidt in talking about how to deal with this problem of too much water being taken out and too little going in.
Jack Schmidt: This trip is about how many different views there are of the same place.
Ian James: That it's just this deficit that is serious is not going away.
Jack Schmidt: We are depressed because nothing we're gonna look at tomorrow is water. Right?
Ian James: They were expressing some frustration that even though people have known these problems were building for years, that the problems haven't been solved.
Naomi Orchard: I feel like we like to divide up all of the issues into their own little categories where the real issue is climate change causing drought, and the inability of our legal system to adapt to this non-stationary and uncertain climate that we've created.
Ian James: One of the students I talked with, Naomi Orchard, she's a student at Utah State.
Naomi Orchard: Umm, I'm a second-generation river guide on the Colorado River. and I'm a current undergrad at USU studying management and restoration of aquatic ecosystems.
Ian James: She said she often hears about how the river is a mechanism of delivering water.
Naomi Orchard: In this class, we kind of get caught up sometimes talking about where it's going and who's getting it and what it's being used for.
Ian James: But as a river guide, she knows it's much more than that, that it is this vibrant ecosystem.
Naomi Orchard: And there's a lot of personal and emotional ties to the river. I grew up running rivers. My first trip, my mom was pregnant. My parents potty trained my sister and I on the river.
Naomi Orchard: It's changed me as a person, fundamentally it's taught me how to be an authentic version of myself and taking people down the river lets me share that with other people. And I think it gives people a perspective of our role on the planet and where we stand and how small we really are.
Ian James: It seemed like one of the main points is that beyond being a water source the river deserves to continue flowing.
Naomi Orchard: The thing that I like to try to remember when we're talking about these big issues of water management and drought is that we're talking about the river as like, this channel. But to me it's its own entity with its own personality and its own beauty and its own purpose and in itself as just a river being a river.
Gustavo Arellano: And also I would think just getting people to understand the water that you use, it comes from somewhere and that somewhere is in danger.
Ian James: That's right. Part of the problem is that for many of us, we turn on the tap, the water comes out, and we don't necessarily think about where it comes from.
Naomi Orchard: We're so disconnected from how we get our water and our food, that it's really easy to forget. We live in a desert. We live in an arid region of the West, and we are all relying on this one river. Forty million people are drinking Colorado River water.
Ian James: More people need to be conscious of the fact that the water that they're using is coming from this river from many miles away and that it has effects.
Gustavo Arellano: Ian, thank you so much for this conversation.
Ian James: Thanks very much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: We'll be featuring the Colorado River every week for the next six weeks. Tune in next Friday where we go up to where the river starts. High up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
Be sure to check out our video coverage of the Colorado River crisis on LATimes.com/colorado-river-crisis
And that's it for this episode of The Times Essential News from the L.A. Times.
Kasia Broussalian and Denise Guerra were the jefas on this episode. Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it and Jazmin Aguilera and Heba Elorbany edited it.
Series theme music composed by Mark Nieto.
Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Monday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.