This summer, America’s water crisis is getting real

Two high profile water crisesjuiced through climate change and industrial overusebuild in the USA. From a Texas city facing a drought emergency to a decade-long political crisis coming to a head for the states that rely on the Colorado River, water issues in the West will take center stage this summer — and experts tell WIRED that other places should take note and start planning ahead for their own futures.

In February, after a winter of record heat, snow pack reached record lows in several mountain ranges across the American West. March has come even hotterbreaking records in states across the region.

“What happened in March was unprecedented, and amazing, and disturbing, and out of this world, frankly — we had temperatures the likes of which we’ve never seen and could not have happened without human-caused climate change,” said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “We had a crumbly snowpack that went from crumbly to god-awful in three weeks.”

This snowmelt crisis has serious impacts on the Colorado River, one of the most important water sources in the West, which supplies water to 40 million people in seven states. River flow in some areas on the Colorado slow to a trickle last week, thanks to the early snow melt this year.

The Colorado River is not only an important water supply: it also provides power to more than 25 million people through dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country. Low water levels in those reservoirs cause difficulty for electricity generation. As of Tuesday morning, Lake Mead was sit at just 17 feet above its record low level, set in July 2022.

This record dry season also collides with a decade-long political crisis on the Colorado River. The states that withdraw water from the river have spent years sparring over how to fairly divide the river’s supply, as the growth of agriculture and a series of climate-induced droughts began to threaten long-term water supplies. Alfalfa for cattle feed is the largest consumer of water of the Colorado, use more water than all the cities along the river combined. States missed key deadlinesincluding one in February, to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which regulates how water is distributed in the region. Each state receives an annual allocation, and the total amount of water is supposed to be divided equally between an upper and a lower basin.

Earlier this month, after dire projections for the summer, the US Department of the Interior stepped in and issued a series of actions meant to keep hydropower going at Lake Powell. The government acknowledges that this could reduce hydropower at Lake Mead as well as the availability of water in states along the lower reaches of the river.

With all this chaos, there’s a chance, Udall says, that this season’s scarce water could cause a historic first in the next few years: States in the upper basin of the river cannot deliver enough water to states in the lower basin, violating the 1922 agreement for the first time. This could cause a possible lawsuit between states.

“What’s frustrating for someone like me is that it’s all predictable,” says Udall. “Those of us who are a little in the know, and that includes a lot of people in the Colorado River Basin, have seen something like this coming for a long, long time.”