And what affects us downstream affects upstream. It is one flow and whatever affects them upstream, affects us. And in the last several years, we’ve started to look at it in terms of the Colorado River itself, as a whole.
So everybody needs to look at what can we do to reuse water? What can we do to save water? Don’t just look at it in terms of “It’s my water, and I gotta protect my water and the heck with everybody else.” Reclamation used to look at it as the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. But we are doing everything we can to make sure that all the water is available.Īs the water level dwindles, there’s going to be less supply for everybody. This year is the hundredth anniversary of the compact that divided up the river, and we’re still following that compact today. It was decided years and years ago in a compact. “Some of the comments that you read say, “California’s taking all our water,” “Arizona’s taking all our water.” It’s not one entity’s water. So your consumptive use drops significantly.” That’s where you’re recycling the water that’s been taken out and put it back in. Maybe desalinization is part of the answer. There’s no way-with the current hydrology conditions-we’re not going to conserve our way out of this issue. We recalculate what our new capacities are. We look at every two feet of change in Lake Mead. We’ve done some things along the way to improve our efficiency of our units.
And we expect probably another 10 to 13% over the next several years. We’ve had about a 25% drop in our capacity for the energy generation. Also the less capacity in the lake-the less height of the water-there’s less head pressure, so the generators operate less efficiently than they would otherwise. The less water we release, the less generation we’re going to get off of that water. Power is not one of the major components as to why the dams were built, but there are concerns with the dwindling ability to generate power. The biggest concern is being able to continue to send the water down the river, to continue to grow the vegetables, to continue to supply the water that the cities need, the agricultural communities need, the tribal entities need as well. We’re into the time of year where we have higher water demands by the farmers, the irrigation districts and the tribal interests down river. Also our inflow of the water coming into it is only about 72% of average. And that number is continuing to drop by the end of this current calendar year.
“We release water out of Hoover Dam based on the water needs of the irrigation districts and the the farmland and the tribal interests down river. We have no other choice.” David Arend interview We have never been this low since the filling of the lake, so every day, it’s a new historic low. It’s pretty simple math. This is a hundred percent uncharted territory. “If the water’s not there, it can’t flow downstream. His responsibilities include oversight of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. I interviewed David at the Hoover Dam near Boulder City, Nevada. David Arend was named the Deputy Regional Director for the Bureau of Reclamations Lower Colorado Basin in December of 2021.
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