Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in 'severe' drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.
Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in "severe" drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.
It's time to ask, "Is this a drought, or is it just the way the hydrology of the Colorado River is going to be?" said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.Greater Las Vegas is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, home to more than 2.2 million people, and it gets just over 4 inches of rain in a good year.
"It isn't sneaking up on us," Entsminger said. "Since 2002, our population has increased close to 50 percent, about 750,000 people in the last 19 years or so, and over that same time our aggregated depletions from the Colorado River have gone down 23 percent." Before it was Phoenix, the Hohokam Indigenous people lived on the land for centuries. "They had a wonderful irrigation network system, and they subsisted in the desert with their canal network for more than a 1,000 years," Ross said, but severe drought forced them to abandon the site. Phoenix is built atop the ruins of the Hohokam people's city, and the canal system that brings water to Phoenix was built on the path first used by the Hohokam.IMAGE: Corrales, N.M. .
"I've already asked all Utahns to conserve water by avoiding long showers, fixing leaky faucets, and planting water-wise landscapes. But I fear those efforts alone won't be enough to protect us," Gov. Spencer Cox recently said in a statement. A report this spring from Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy argues that "the perception that Arizona is worst off among the western states is wrong.". But as populations boom, more farmland is becoming neighborhoods, driving down water use.
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