Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005 | 11:12 a.m.
Rain and snow that have swept across the Southwest were disasters for communities in Southern California, Utah and Southern Nevada, but brought good news for the region's imperiled water supply.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which regulates the water supply in the Colorado River through its massive reservoirs in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, last year had predicted that by January, Lake Mead would be at a level of 1,125 feet above sea level -- a level that it has not seen since Powell was filling three decades ago.
Instead, the level is at 1,135 feet, thanks to the precipitation. While that is still more than 85 feet below the full line at Hoover Dam, it is significantly more than what local and federal officials had feared it would be.
"That's about 2 feet higher than what we were projecting in December," Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Robert Walsh said. "In September, we were projecting 1,125 by the end of the year. The storms have certainly done us a service in terms of increasing what we had anticipated."
The increase equals tens of billions of gallons in Lake Mead, source of 90 percent of the drinking water for urban Southern Nevada. Walsh said the rain affected the lake in several ways.
"The storms -- their impact was two-fold, maybe three-fold," he said. "The rains reduced the demand for water downstream. As a result, we were able to reduce our releases from Hoover Dam.
"We cut them by 50 percent over the last several days," Walsh said.
Streams that ordinarily amount to a relative trickle also grew fat from the rainwater, and not just north of Lake Mead. Walsh said a small river in central Arizona fed Lake Havasu, downstream but north of the diversion for California's sprawling agricultural uses.
"There was a pretty substantial inflow from the Bill Williams River, north of Lake Havasu," he said. "We were using rainwater instead of water from storage."
Three rivers in our region, which spilled over their banks and in some cases into people's homes, also helped feed Lake Mead.
"The third impact was the Muddy, the Virgin and the Little Colorado, all the streams that ordinarily don't have a lot of water but brought us some unexpected inflow," Walsh said.
Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water wholesaler from the region, said the extra water in the lake is good news, but she also warned that it doesn't mean the Southwest's water woes are over. Even extraordinary snowfalls and rain can't repair five years of drought, she said.
At the end of December, Lake Powell, the reservoir supplying Lake Mead, was below 40 percent of capacity.
"It took five years to create the hole in Lake Powell," Mulroy said. "It is going to take years to refill."
The winter, during which critical snowfall comes to the Rocky Mountains, is still not over, she noted. "Now, projections (of total precipitation) are normal or close to normal, but you still don't know what the spring would bring. We won't know until we get to the end of the snow season and the runoff begins."
Still, the evidence is out there for those who view the glass as half full. The Western Regional Climate Center in Reno is reporting one spot near Cedar City as receiving 306 percent of its usual precipitation thus far. Other stations in Utah are funning from 254 to 129 percent of normal.
The numbers in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming, the other state of the northern Colorado River Basin, are not as high, but they are still good. In Colorado the stations are reporting 154 to 97 percent of usual precipitation.
Most of the precipitation is concentrated in the southern Rockies. Reporting stations in Wyoming, where the Green River feeds the Colorado, range from 129 percent of usual to less than 70 percent.
Meteorologists hope that a shift of the jet stream will bring more water to the northern Rockies, which continues to be locked in drought.
Mulroy said that even if the entire West gets a good water year, that doesn't mean the drought is over.
"There's good news out there, and it comes unfortunately with a lot of destruction, but we don't know if this is just a wet year in a dry cycle or the end of a cycle."
Mulroy said a more important factor than the weather will keep Las Vegas from declaring a "drought emergency" with more mandatory water conservation measures.
"The community response has been so tremendous that we don't have to add layers to the drought plan," she said. "We don't need to go to the next level."
The water authority board will meet Thursday and the staff is recommending that the region stay in "drought alert," Mulroy said.
Southern Nevada, however, still has to work with the other six states of the Colorado River basin to plan for a worst-case situation, a deepening of the drought. The U.S. Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Reclamation, has asked the seven states to come up with a plan to cut basic apportionments from the Colorado River and Lake Mead if the drought worsens.
Frustrated by a lack of recommendations, Interior Secretary Gale Norton put an April deadline for the states' effort last month.
Reclamation Commissioner John Keys said that deadline is still in place.
"If the drought continues, we will have to develop guidelines and procedures to reduce water deliveries to the Lower Basin," Keys said last week. "In December, we asked the basin states to submit a report to the secretary, due in April, recommending proactive management actions in the basin.
"As the official with delegated responsibility to manage the lower Colorado River, the secretary will have to implement plans to address a continued drought, even in the absence of a consensus plan," he said.
Like Mulroy, Keys warned water users on the Colorado River against premature celebration.
"One good rain or one wet year does not mean that the drought is over. At this time last year there were optimistic snowpack projections. Then along came a hot dry spring, the snowpack melted, the runoff for the year was below normal and we were faced with yet another year of drought," he said.
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