US West Drought

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rkovars
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US West Drought

Post by rkovars »

While I was looking through my photos to grab some Mount Washington pics I came across this guy.

This is a photo I took of Lake Mead while standing on the Hoover Dam sometime in 1998.
20071208_174555000_iOS.jpg



Pretty much the same view from 2021.

mead.jpg
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Thunder1
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Thunder1 »

Lake Meade is currently at about 30% of it's 1998 capacity, right? :(
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Robotaz
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Robotaz »

I live on the Colorado River and last month it was flowing 14% of normal.

I’m moving to Tennessee soon and am very concerned about what is going to happen in the southwest after I’m gone.
Mikkei4
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Mikkei4 »

Those photos are truly frightening. Is this due to lack of rain, increased population in the surrounding areas, increased use of water on the surrounding area's golf courses, bit of all of these?
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Thunder1 »

Lack of rain...
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Robotaz
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Re: US West Drought

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Mikkei4 wrote:Those photos are truly frightening. Is this due to lack of rain, increased population in the surrounding areas, increased use of water on the surrounding area's golf courses, bit of all of these?
Less precipitation as a whole, less snowpack and runoff, combined with increasing users, combined with horrible planning. Most of Colorado had an almost normal snowpack this year, but everything is so dry that the Colorado River barely had a June increase, and it only lasted 2-3 weeks. I walk along the river every day and watch it.
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Robotaz
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Robotaz »

I forgot to mention something I learned about the Colorado River problems back in engineering school in Arizona.

I took an elective environmental engineering course and we had a guest speaker visit who was an attorney specializing in “riparian water law”, which is the primitive basis for how water is distributed, and itself a major problem with management.

Anyway, he said the the US Army Corps of Engineers studied the Colorado River’s flow for 5 years and based their designs on the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams off of those flows. Well, turns out those 5 years happen to have been 1,000 year high flow years. This created problems regarding basically every aspect of the dams’ performances. What we’re seeing are reservoirs that are receiving much more normal, and now historic low, flow rates.

There’s a lot going on, but what we are seeing are dams that use way more water than they should to generate electricity. Sediment is building rapidly in Lake Powell and reducing its volume. All kinds of problems that really didn’t present themselves until flow rates became less than normal. Now it’s just a trainwreck and I don’t see any practical solutions beyond pipelining desalinated water to cities from the west coast. The only alternative is for flow rates to increase on their own, and I think expecting that is reckless at this point.
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Robotaz
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Re: US West Drought

Post by Robotaz »

Here’s the Gunnison River a few miles before it drops into the Colorado. Flow looks great on this river. We had a lot of rain recently. 2-3 days straight.

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richtel
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Re: US West Drought

Post by richtel »

I wonder to what degree the never-ending thirst for power generated by the Hoover hydro has demanded increased flow which has exacerbated the problem. The scale of near-by LV is jaw-dropping.
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