Drought "is not a temporary condition we can expect to go away, but rather something we have to deal with," one expert said.
By Ben Kesslen
Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history, and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain.
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.
Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise.
This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region.
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.
Around 90 percent of the water comes from Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Colorado River formed by the Hoover Dam, which is currently 36 percent full.
Some Western governors are frustrated by their lack of any control over their predicament a changing climate puts them in.
But most Western Governors are more proactive, and are trying to plan for increasing water scarcity.
The last time the American West was this dry was in the Dark Ages. The Vikings were raiding Northern Europe.
The West is unique in that many westerners depend on snow in the mountains slowly melting into the summer. This year there isn’t much snow to melt.
This year’s Fire Season across the West is expected to be especially severe.
Springer rattled off DNR numbers that showed “the growth and the intensity of the wildfires over the decades.”
In the 1990s, about 86,000 acres burned on average per year, according to DNR estimates. That increased to an average of 189,000 acres annually, in the 2000s.
Between 2015 and 2019, an annual 488,000 acres burned on average.
And last year, 812,000 acres burned — an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
“This is a rapidly evolving, intensifying natural disaster,” said Springer. “And frankly, hoping for a damp, cool summer is not a strategy.”
After checking the U.S. Drought Monitor for the West I am relieved to see my county is merely ‘Abnormally Dry’. I guess that makes me and my neighbors some of luckier residents of the American West.
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