At Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, the infamous bathtub ring—a chalk-white coating of minerals that receding waters have left behind—serves as a daily reminder of the 158 feet of water that is no longer there.
In mid-December, I drove to Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, to see its infamous bathtub ring. The bathtub, in this metaphor, is Lake Mead, on the border between Nevada and Arizona; the ring is a chalk-white coating of minerals that its receding waters have left behind. The Southwest, which includes the Colorado River Basin, has been in a protracted drought since 2000; climate change has made it worse.
The 1922 compact gave states the collective right to withdraw fifteen million acre-feet of water from the Colorado each year. But the volume of water in the river, most of which comes from Rocky Mountain snowmelt, has historically been more like twelve million acre-feet; in 2002, it was, terrifyingly, only 3.8 million. And, because states are legally entitled to draw down a dwindling resource, Lake Mead and its sister reservoir, Lake Powell, are approaching critical levels.
Theoretically, water rights are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. The All-American Canal, which feeds the Imperial Valley, was built decades before the Central Arizona Project, a gigantic aqueduct system that began construction in the seventies, so Southern California has senior rights. Arizona, with its junior rights, could have its water allotment cut to zero before Imperial Valley farms face any cuts at all.
Nevada has emerged as a leader in water conservation, in part because of its vulnerability: the Colorado River supplies ninety per cent of Las Vegas’s water, but Nevada has junior rights. Nevada’s population has grown by around seven hundred and fifty thousand people since the drought began, but it has curbed its use of Colorado River water by twenty-six per cent.
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