Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
Because seriously that train is pulling into the station any minute now.
Unbelievably the Southern Nevada Water Authority (the umbrella organization that takes water from Lake Mead and supplies six or seven water agencies) forecasts that at slightly increasing usage rates Lake Mead and groundwater will supply So. NV until 2058 or until 2035 at heavier usage rates. Pages 5 & 6 here.
https://www.snwa.com/assets/pdf/wr_plan_chapter4.pdf
Southern California takes 4.4 million acre feet/year (AFY) of water from the Colorado River via canals and an aqueduct, Arizona pulls 1 million AFY from Lake Havasu via the Central AZ Project, an open canal reaching to Phoenix and Tucson. SNWA can only pull 300,000 AFY from Lake Mead. CA & AZ use their water for agriculture as well as domestic purposes. AZ grows water intensive crops like Pima cotton. Upstream from Lake Mead on the far end of the Grand Canyon and Marble Canyon is another storage lagoon called Lake Powell. Powell doesn't directly supply anything with water except the electric generators in Glen Canyon dam. Those generators mostly work in the summer during the afternoon and evening when the AC's in Phoenix are blasting. The level of Lake Powell has dropped enough to require that power be bought from the open market to supply AZ sufficiently. Lake Powell loses about 280 billion gallons of water every year through evaporation and leakage out the bottom into the sand and porous sandstone. The varying water flow through Glen Canyon dam results in a daily "tide" in the river level of Marble and Grand Canyon. Lake Powell and it's effect on the Colorado River and uses here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/op...ado-river.html
and a view from LA here. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...429-story.html
bottom line; So. Nevada will lose 13,000 AFY if Lake Mead drops much lower, the Colorado River makes life possible for about 40 million people not just Vegas and supplies a lot of our vegetables and nuts, dams in the west are being removed and Lake Powell could be drained, fifteen years of drought show no sign of ending, southern Nevada and Arizona should follow California in trying harder to conserve, the Colorado River is divided up according to an agreement signed in 1922 between 7 states and Mexico later