A monthly members-only column by Alan Dulaney
Well, they blew it. The November 11 deadline, set by the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), for the seven states that share the Colorado River to come up with a new plan for managing the river was reached without an agreement. Everyone knew it was coming. All seven states (plus Mexico) adamantly refused to surrender one inch of their established positions on reductions in water deliveries or how to operate the system for both water deliveries from the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) to the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada) and hydroelectric power sales across the Western electrical grid. Stalemate was inevitable.
Certain facts are accepted by all parties. The 1922 Colorado River Compact specified the annual flows of the river to be 15 million acre-feet per year (maf/yr). This was divided into 7.5 maf/r for the Upper Basin and 7.5 maf/yr for the Lower Basin. These numbers were wildly optimistic, but in 1922 no one cared. Regardless of what hydrologists might say about the anticipated flows, the seven states in the Compact felt there would be enough water to underpin development for dozens of decades. Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote a book about this: Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River (University of Arizona Press, 2021).
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