Hoover Dam – California’s Next Megadrought Has Already Begun

The Hoover Dam from Las Vegas 30 miles to the southeast and is located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River near the border of Nevada and Arizona. The Hoover Dam is a great architectural works to regulate the flow of water, flood prevention, irrigation standards for irrigation of crops and the most important is the power supply for the city of Las Vegas nightlife and a Southern California celebrated the vitality especially in the period of scarcity of oil as hydropower currently used replacement of oil fired power plants.

The Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression. Once known as the Boulder Dam the Hoover Dam is located on the border of Nevada and Arizona near Boulder City, Nevada. It is one of the highest concrete dams ever built and it created one of the largest man-made lakes in the United States. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At 726.4 feet tall, it took 200 engineers from several consulting firms and the Bureau of Reclamation to design the dam. It has 3,125,000 cubic yards of concrete and weighs more than 6.6 million tons! Construction of the dam, power plant, and related works took five years to build and was finished two years ahead of schedule. The reservoir created can hold enough water to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania with water one foot deep.

Lake Mead—which used to be the nation’s largest reservoir—serves as the main water storage facility on the Colorado River.

Amid one of the worst droughts in millennia, record lows at Lake Mead are becoming an annual event—last year’s low was 7 feet higher than this year’s expected June nadir, 1,073 feet.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, will declare an official shortage for the first time ever—setting into motion a series of already agreed-upon mandatory cuts in water outlays, primarily to Arizona. (Nevada and Mexico will also receive smaller cuts.) The latest forecasts give a 33 percent chance of this happening.

There’s a greater than 75 percent chance of the same scenario on Jan. 1, 2017. Barring a sudden unexpected end to the drought, official shortage conditions are likely for the indefinite future.

Why Arizona? In exchange for agreeing to be the first in line for rationing when a shortage occurs,

Arizona was permitted in the 1960s to build the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water 336 miles over 3,000 feet of mountain ranges all the way to Tucson.

It’s the longest and costliest aqueduct in American history, and Arizona couldn’t exist in its modern state without it. Now that a shortage is imminent, another fundamental change in the status quo is on the way. As in California, the current drought may take a considerable and lasting toll on Arizona, especially for the state’s farmers.

According to Robert Glennon, a water policy expert at the University of Arizona, the current situation was inevitable. “It’s really no surprise that this day was coming, for the simple reason that the Colorado River is overallocated,” Glennon told me over the phone last week.

Glennon explained that the original Colorado River compact of 1922, which governs how seven states and Mexico use the river, was negotiated during “the wettest 10-year period in the last 1,000 years.” That law portioned out about 25 percent more water than regularly flows, so even in “normal” years, big reservoirs like Lake Mead are in a long-term decline. “We’ve been saved from the disaster because Arizona and these other states were not using all their water,” Glennon said.

They are now.

Since around 2000, Arizona has been withdrawing its full allotment from the Colorado River, and it’s impossible to overstate how important the Colorado has become to the state.

About 40 percent of Arizona’s water comes from the Colorado, and state officials partially attribute a nearly 20-fold increase in the state’s economy over the last 50 years to increased access to the river.