Thursday July 11, 2024
Deseret News —
The issue of water — who gets it, how much they get and what happens when Mother Nature doesn’t provide enough — is not a new conflict in the Intermountain West.
Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Park is the link in the multistate system that feeds the Colorado River from the upper basin states to its lower basin counterparts. In its trip, the Colorado River water, mainly provided by snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, travels through the upper basin states comprising Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. It then flows through Lake Powell down to Lake Mead, feeding the lower basin states: Nevada, Arizona and California.
“Over the last two or so years, there’s been an upper basin-wide conservation program that basically pays water users, farmer in particular, to voluntarily forego irrigation for a season in an effort to conserve water,” Amy Haas, who is the executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, said in a virtual news conference, Tuesday. “And this really started in response to some of the emergency low lake levels that we saw at Lake Powell and Lake Mead in 2022.”