US To States: Act Fast On Drought Or Face Water Restrictions

[hatrack]

Shaun McKinnon
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 30, 2004 12:00 AM


"Alarmed by disastrous drought conditions, the federal government is prepared to impose water restrictions along the Colorado River if Arizona and the other states that use it don't come up with a plan of their own.

Officials won't say what form those restrictions might take, but when California failed to settle a dispute at the end of 2002, the Interior Department slashed the water supply to millions of people in Los Angeles and San Diego and cut the allocation to farmers in the Imperial Valley.

Without an alternative plan, existing laws could trigger measures by 2007 that two or three years ago seemed unthinkable: Arizona could lose one-third or more of the water that supplies Phoenix and Tucson. Farmers could be forced to leave fallow thousands of acres of cropland. Upper-basin states could face the choice of releasing water to down-river states or flouting the law to keep their own taps flowing."

EDIT

The past five years now rank as the five driest consecutive years in at least a century, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. A freakish warm streak in March devastated the high-country snowpack, ending hope that what had been a decent winter might buy the seven states a little more time. "March was a real downer this year," bureau hydrologist Paul Davidson said. "We should have received a big part of our snowpack then, but now that's missing, and to make it up is impossible." In Utah, snowpack sat at 106 percent of normal on March 1 and had plunged to 65 percent of normal just 31 days later. "It just disappeared, it melted, went into the ground," said Larry Anderson, director of the state's Division of Water Resources. "That's not going to get to any of the storage reservoirs."

EDIT

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0430drought.html

[Bandit]

1. No such thing as Global Warming, this is something different

We are drying up because the sun is too brite. Ya that's the ticket. We will Privatize the water source and that will fix everything. Privatization is the answer to everything and if that doesn't work TAX CUTS.

[UpInArms]

2. kick

:kick:

[havocmom]

3. State of Montana to Army Corp of Engineers and the state of Missouri:

We cannot maintain the policy of letting more water out of the Ft. Peck Lake than nature puts in! Tell the barge owners to just accept the fact that the Rockie Mountains and surrounding areas which feed the upper Missouri River are in a long period of drought. They cannot have the same amount of water year after year when things upstream are drying up!

Is the maladministration courting the state of MO by insisting the Corp of Engineers not adjust flow out of the Ft Peck and other dams to what is actually flowing into them? They seem to think that MT and ND are solidly in their corner. We are not. True, we don't have the electoral pull MO has, but we just might be a sleeping giant politically. When a policy debacle manages to unite environmentalists, ranchers, sportsmen and merchants around here, there must something to it.

We are in a serious drought. Rivers which form the headwaters of the Missouri are going dry. Some already are dry and there are mud flats where once there were mountain reservoirs. We cannot send the same amount of water downstream. Surely even the junta can figure that one out.