Brea Chiodini, who owns Laughlin River Tours with her husband Trevor, relies on the flow of the Colorado River to stay afloat.
As the federal government inches closer to declaring the river’s first water shortage, Chiodini is looking toward the future, or, if the river is tapped too much, the lack of one.
“For too long, we’ve ignored the fact that the current levels of rainfall and snowpack can’t sustain the increasing demands,” Chiodini said. “Our businesses, families and communities are already suffering from the effect of the drought restrictions.”
Chiodini was one member of a coalition gathered near Hoover Dam today to support a moratorium on what they called wasteful water projects in the face of ongoing drought conditions in the Southwest.
“We need a moratorium on new dams and proposed pipelines — wasteful projects,” said Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Great Bain Water Network. Roerink cited the proposed Lake Powell pipeline, which would pump around 83,756 acre-feet of water a year to Southern Utah, as an example.
Roerink, flanked by business, agricultural and environmental leaders from Nevada, California and Utah, also discussed the need for water-friendly development. The Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, introduced by Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, would open up 30,663 acres around Las Vegas to development to the chagrin of some environmental groups.
“We’re not here to say no to new development,” Roerink said. “We’re here to say if you’re going to develop, we need sustainable, identified supplies of water to do so.”
The Colorado River watershed, which supplies water around much of the West, is expected to reach a shortage for the first time this summer, a consequence of prolonged drought and shrinking snowpack caused by climate change.
A declared shortage on Lake Mead is not likely to impact Nevadans directly, due to the state’s large-scale water recycling measures.
Nevada’s allotment of Colorado River water is around 300,000 acre-feet a year, a number that has been in place since 1922, when the state’s population was much smaller.
A shortage would drop that allotment to 279,000 acre-feet, still higher than the 256,000 acre-feet of water the Southern Nevada Water Authority said the state used in 2020.
However, as the “bathtub ring” on Lake Mead continues to rise, so do the concerns of environmentalists, farmers and others.
Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom said that further development along the river could significantly cut into the long-term health of the watershed.
“Rivers are arteries, and if you build a dam, it’s like putting a tourniquet on it,” Segerblom said.
J.B. Hamby, the vice president of the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors, said that lake has taken on a new meaning as it sits around one-third full.
“In the 20th Century, the Hoover Dam was a monument to the genius and labor that made the vision of lonely lands made fruitful a reality,” Hamby said. “But today in the 21t Century, the dam and the lake ... serve as another symbol: of drought, uncertainty and unsustainability.”
It’s time, he said, to reconsider how water is treated in the West.
“In a time of unprecedented drought, it must be realized that Cadillac desert dreams of urban sprawl across the southwestern landscape, a sort of suburban manifest destiny, threaten the current and future sustainability of this river and communities that depend on it,” Hamby said.