Tag: Arizona
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Breaking Down What We Need to Save the Colorado River
The Colorado River provides essential water to millions across the American West — but the river is running dry. Here’s how we save it. The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people across 7 states and nearly 30 indigenous tribes. Several factors have together led to dwindling water supplies, driving cuts and negotiations on states’ use. But these…
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Here’s how much Lake Mead could rise after an epic winter and new water cuts
Photo: Intake towers for the Hoover Dam rise above the surface of Lake Mead in April 2023. Will Lanzoni/CNN Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, spent much of last spring and summer in free fall. Over the course of four months, Mead’s elevation plummeted an astonishing 20 feet, first exposing one of the lake’s huge intake valves in April…
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No time to waste for government to protect drought-stricken West
For decades, Western cities like Las Vegas and Tucson, Ariz., have embraced water conservation and recycling as a means of preparing for a multidecade drought like the one we’re experiencing. Despite our best efforts, our neighbors in Southern California, Northern Arizona and Utah have not always followed our lead. Cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and…
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Arizona Begins to Understand Water
Photo: Arizona has finally realized that it cannot grow forever because it doesn’t have water to do so. And this is going to be very, very interesting to watch. In one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, it’s a boom time — water-intensive microchip companies and data centers moving in; tens of thousands…
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Curbside Capture of Desert Rain
Photo: The city of Tucson, Arizona, imports the majority of its water from the drought-stricken Colorado River, via the 336 mile long Central Arizona Project Canal. (Photo: John Morton, Flickr, CC BY 2.0) Thirty years ago, a neighborhood group in Tucson started harvesting local rainwater by directing runoff into street-side basins filled with native, food-bearing…