US government planning dramatic Colorado River water cuts due to drought, overuse

[excalibur]

The Colorado River Basin is in a drought right now, a normally occurring event, but drought nonetheless.

Colorado Region Conditions

View current Drought Information for theColorado River Basin Watershed. Explore impacts on Agriculture and Water Supply, and view detailed Historical Conditions for the Colorado River Basin.

www.drought.gov

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Mushroom No, it isn't fake news, it is the fact.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Droughts are a common occurrence in that area but they have been exacerbated by the excessive population of Las Vegas and SoCal.

The biggest problem is the agriculture industry in California.

 

[EdwinAMartin]

Sure, go ahead and move to the AZ desert were no man should be living.....Build out some water hungry data centers while you are about it.....Everything will be just fine.

^^^This. Building a major city like LA in the middle of a giant waterless gravel pit is even dumber. They should be getting their water pumped down from Nor Cal. They were suffering water shortages over a hundred years ago, yet they just kept building anyway, and devising schemes to take other regions' water.

 

[Mushroom]

Good post. I would only slightly disagree with it being strictly overpopulation. It is overpopulation coupled with refusal to implement common sense water conservation.

Which once again is entirely based upon overpopulation.

This should really drive this fact home. In 1980, there was no concern about "drought" even in years with little to no rain. California had a population of over 23.5 million people and LA county had just under 7.5 million people. And more than enough storage and transfer capability to move as much water as needed at the time.

Now California is still getting the same amount of rain as it did in 1980. However, the storage capacity is actually lower because they have been actively destroying dams. But in 2020, the state population is just over 39.5 million, and the population of LA is just over 10 million.

The amount of rainfall has not decreased, but the amount of storage has decreased as the population has shown a significant increase. And as can clearly be seen, the population of LA County has grown significantly, which is where a lot of that water is going.

Go back four decades ago, and there was no problem supporting both the massive agriculture as well as the large population on the amount of water available without depleting the reservoirs. Today they are depleting the reservoirs, and large areas have had agriculture largely shut down and there is still not enough water.

Even if they instituted every "common sense conservation" solutions, there is simply not enough water available.

Oh, and it is not just LA. In 1980, the Las Vegas Metro area had 463k people living in it. In 2020, it had over 2.2 million. With a population of over four times what it was 40 years earlier, that of course is going to have a water usage of more than four times what it was at that time.

 

[Mushroom]

The biggest problem is the agriculture industry in California.

OK, so how much starvation are you willing to put up with?

That "problem" supplies 20% of the food in the US. Over 75% of fruits and nuts produced in the US come from California.

 

[EdwinAMartin]

The biggest problem is the agriculture industry in California.

The water wasted on nutritionally worthless crops like iceberg lettuce is criminal.

 

[Mushroom]

^^^This. Building a major city like LA in the middle of a giant waterless gravel pit is even dumber. They should be getting their water pumped down from Nor Cal.

They are.

That is what the California Aqueduct is for. A major piece of California infrastructure that goes all the way up to Oroville and Shasta, primarily with the goal of moving water down to LA.

And that was added when the earlier Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens Valley and the Colorado River Aqueduct were no longer able to provide enough water to the exploding population of LA.

And even with three major aqueducts feeding water into LA, it is still not enough.

 

[Mushroom]

Mushroom No, it isn't fake news, it is the fact.

Was fake news, and is still fake news.

Care to discuss the chart from your own reference that shows no major change in rainfall in over 2,000 years?

 

[EdwinAMartin]

They are.

Yes, I know; it's been a long time problem for them. They've been kicking that can down the road since the late 1800's.

Geography matters. It won't be the first time in history people have had to migrate en masse from a region that can no longer support them to somewhere else.

 

[The Duke]

Why doesn't L.A. capture all that water in their huge freakin' ditch thing that just runs to the sea and run it through a water treatment plant? The sea does not need the fresh water, people do.
What I'm talking about can be seen in "The Terminator" movie.

 

[The Duke]

Which once again is entirely based upon overpopulation.

This should really drive this fact home. In 1980, there was no concern about "drought" even in years with little to no rain. California had a population of over 23.5 million people and LA county had just under 7.5 million people. And more than enough storage and transfer capability to move as much water as needed at the time.

Now California is still getting the same amount of rain as it did in 1980. However, the storage capacity is actually lower because they have been actively destroying dams. But in 2020, the state population is just over 39.5 million, and the population of LA is just over 10 million.

The amount of rainfall has not decreased, but the amount of storage has decreased as the population has shown a significant increase. And as can clearly be seen, the population of LA County has grown significantly, which is where a lot of that water is going.

Go back four decades ago, and there was no problem supporting both the massive agriculture as well as the large population on the amount of water available without depleting the reservoirs. Today they are depleting the reservoirs, and large areas have had agriculture largely shut down and there is still not enough water.

Even if they instituted every "common sense conservation" solutions, there is simply not enough water available.

Oh, and it is not just LA. In 1980, the Las Vegas Metro area had 463k people living in it. In 2020, it had over 2.2 million. With a population of over four times what it was 40 years earlier, that of course is going to have a water usage of more than four times what it was at that time.

Sounds like a great reason to deport illegals.
Also I'd bet the California census is off by 10 million or more, 10 million more counted than are.
That's to gain extra electoral votes and House seats. Yep.

 

[EdwinAMartin]

Which once again is entirely based upon overpopulation.

Texas is also facing the same dilemma. It is mostly arid, like much of the Great Plains. There are almost no natural lakes here, I think a couple in east Texas were; they are all basically reservoirs.

 

[Concerned American]

I could swear they have groundwater in the Mojave. It's deep, but it's there. They have springs and streams in the mountains
surrounding. They should have already had water treatment plants.

Las Vegas is in the Mojave--they've had a great supply in Mead since Hoover Dam was built but the over-population and wasteful practices of the casinos coupled with SoCal have pretty much drained it. If water is under that desert--it is way under.

 

[1srelluc]

Im reminded of this

Look, this is sand and 100 years from now it will still be sand.....Move to where the water is!

 

[eagle1462010]

And then there is the thing that most people tend to completely ignore about "USA for Africa".

The starvation was 100% man made. Much like Somalia, there was unrest and civil war, and the Marxist Derg government in charge at the time weaponized food as a way to force areas into compliance. Do not support the government? They are going to cut off your water and steal all your food and sit back as you starve until you give in.

And all that money that was raised so they could buy food for the starving? The government happily took all of it, then sat back eating very well as the people in other areas continued to starve. Over $75 million was raised, And when it was realized that most of the food in Ethiopia was being taken by the government they started donating the money to other nations in the area that were not being starved by their own government.

Throughout much of history, Africa has a long tradition of when people revolt against their government, they weaponize food and water. In the last four decades we have seen that in both Ethiopia and Somalia. That is what the entire "Blackhawk Down" incident was all about. Mohamed Aidid was trying to starve the people in and around Mogadishu, the UN with the assistance of the US, Malaysia and Pakistan were trying to deliver food to the area. And as it was helping the population resist Aidid, he started attacking the UN aid workers and the forces defending them.

They shouldnt have been starving because the Ocean is there. We could throw a hook in shiny no bait and get a hit.

Been there. mudwhistle was on the ground there

 

[EdwinAMartin]

Look, this is sand and 100 years from now it will still be sand.....Move to where the water is!

Yep. there is a reason why the majority of the population lives east of the Mississippi.. Used to be 75% lived in the East, now it's around 65%, apparently. Less than 10% of the population in the West lives in rural areas. Forget all those westerns; they give a false impression of history. It was largely mining that was the big draw, not becoming Little Joe and Hoss roaming around a large self-sufficient estate playing cowboys.

 

[MarathonMike]

Even if they instituted every "common sense conservation" solutions, there is simply not enough water available.

That is impossible to prove. What is certain is that the depletion of the Colorado River Reservoirs would be significantly less than what we see today. This was the inevitable outcome of refusal to conserve coupled with the massive population and industrial growth of California.

 

[Concerned American]

The biggest problem is the agriculture industry in California.

There is relatively little ag in SoCal--certainly they grow a bit of lettuce in the Coachella valley and there are some avocados, strawberries and oranges, but the VAST majority of ag is grown on the central coast and the central valley and those folks are in constant competition with SoCal to keep their water from being sent south. The CA aquaduct takes massive amounts of water from the Sacramento, American, Feather, Mokelumne, Tuolumne, San Joaquin and Kings Rivers watersheds. San Francisco takes a lot from the Yosemite area with Hetch Hetchy as well. The tap should be shut off to SoCal--let them desalinate.

 

[Mushroom]

One thing is incredibly obvious in this thread, that people are apparently blissfully unaware of the history of water in California. They do not even have the amount of information that could be gained from watching the classic 1974 Jack Nicholson film "Chinatown". Which was a fictional take on the California Water Wars of the early 20th century.

LA has been "stealing" water from other areas for over a century.



I lived in and around this water system for decades. At one time even working at the main facility for receiving and purifying water coming in from the aqueducts for the city of LA itself. And until just a few years ago living less than a mile from the second largest reservoir in the system sending water to LA.

Now the history of aqueducts in California goes back over a century, from the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1908, the Colorado River Aqueduct in 1933, and the California Aqueduct in 1963 (years on date construction started). And those three aqueducts into the early 1980s were sufficient to not only supply the city with more than enough water, but to also support agriculture as well as maintain sufficient water in the watersheds so as to not drain them.

But by the end of the 1980s, that showed there was simply not enough water. Water restrictions started to be put in place, agriculture was curtailed, and watersheds started decreasing. And now decades later the population and demands have only increased, and there is just not enough water left.

If people are interested, I can suggest a lot of good documentaries about the Water Wars and the infrastructure that exists to move this water around. Even the low points of the project, like the collapse of the San Francisquito Dam in 1928 which killed over 430 people, and the almost collapse of the 1971 Lower Van Norman Dam which caused me and my family to be on a 30 minute evacuation notice as we were literally in the flood path if it had failed.

In short, there is simply not enough water available to supply that large of a population. Period. Even in the wettest of winters like in 2017 when the Oroville Dam overtopped because of too much water the state was still in their perpetual state of drought. When every reservoir in the state was at and over maximum capacity and there was still not enough water, that shows you have a consumption problem, not a supply problem.

 

[1srelluc]

I love me some Western water threads.....They always deliver!

I'll tell you what though, yeah, I can watch millions of gallons of water roll by my place along the Shenandoah River but it seems like there is less flow every year from drawing out of it.

But hell yes, build another 100 homes and maybe even a data center. Go ahead and put that water restriction sign up earlier every damn year.

People are just plain stupid but at least I will have run out the clock on them by the time it's too late.