CO River Plan Would Designate 500K Acre-Feet In Powell; Water Savings From Upstream Repaid In Cash

[hatrack]

EDIT

The Upper Basin Drought Contingency Plan has two components: The first involves new storage in Powell and an aggressive 500,000-acre-foot water savings plan, in which water users in each of the four Upper Basin states would voluntarily agree to reduce water use. Their saved water would then be stored in a protected pool in Lake Powell. Any farmer or city that contributes to the drought pool would be paid. How those water savings would be achieved and who would pay for them has yet to be determined and each Upper Basin state would have to agree to participate, said Karen Kwon, an attorney with the Colorado Attorney General's Federal and Interstate Water Unit who has been helping write and negotiate the agreements.

The second component involves a new operating agreement that would allow water to be released from Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico and part of Colorado, and Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming and Utah and sent down to Powell in times when it is needed.

Officials hope the agreements can be approved by water users, the states and Congress and finalized next year, Kwon said. "I think this is really hopeful," said Melinda Kassen, senior counsel at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Trust who also sits on Colorado's Interbasin Compact Committee, a group that monitors water issues within the state and between its major river basins. "We've been talking about this kind of account in Lake Powell for a number of years, but the Lower Basin would never consider it. They didn't want us to be able to store water in Powell that wasn't subject to [use by the Lower Basin]. That position has changed now. That's what makes this announcement so important," Kassen said.

The agreements come after a devastating year in which Colorado and other states saw some of the lowest snowpacks and streamflows on record. Flows into Lake Powell were roughly one-third of average and Powell and Mead are now just 44 percent full on a combined basis.

EDIT

http://www.journal-advocate.com/sterling-local_news/ci_32199064/agreement-reached-drought-management

[shanny]

1. What is the point

of "storing" increasingly scarce water in a lake in the middle of a desert in a rapidly warming climate?

Somebody needs to think further out of the box.

[hatrack]

2. The key is the third paragraph cited above . .

The Colorado River Compact has been held as written in stone for nearly a century now. This is the first real breakdown in its structure and the first sign that reality is beginning to seep into the situation.

Though as you point out, the whole proposition is slightly mad. Yesterday's "visionary" looks more and more like today's "hallucinatory", which makes trying to maintain today's infrastructure in the face of a disruptive tomorrow even crazier.