update: A correction to this post here, thanks to some excellent journalistic sleuthing by Tony Davis.

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The Bureau of Reclamation’s Aug. 1 Colorado River Lower Basin Water Use Forecast (pdf here) passed a symbolically important milestone: at a forecast consumptive use of 6.998 million acre feet, if the forecast holds, this will be the first time Lower Basin use has been below 7 million acre feet since 1992.

Water use in 1992 was down because it was an extremely wet year. In Arizona, for example, it was one of the three wettest years in the last half century. This year has been dry. Water use is down because water users across the basin are cranking down their water use to try to keep Lake Mead from dropping further.

Here’s the data, with consumptive use in Nevada, Arizona, and California, plus reservoir evaporation in Lake Mead and the major reservoirs downstream – 7.858 million acre feet this year, compared to 7.806 maf in 1992. It’s a 17.5 percent decrease in water consumption since the 2002 peak:

Lower Colorado River Basin water consumption

Since 1992, the population in the major metropolitan areas served with Lower Basin water – LA-San Diego, central Arizona, and Las Vegas – has grown from 19 million to 26 million. That’s pretty striking – 7 million more people using essentially the same amount of water.

One of the central arguments of my new book Water is For Fighting Over is that when people have less water, they use less water – that we have the ability to significantly reduce our water use in the arid West and still thrive, and that we are in fact already making significant progress. That’s what’s happening in the graph above.

I wanna tell you the story of the time I met Sandra Postel in a dry riverbed in the deserts of Mexico.

When I first started writing about water more than two decades ago, the work of the water scholar Postel was both informative and inspirational. As much as anything I came across, her work convinced me that dealing with water scarcity was a problem that mattered, that was worth’s a life’s attention. Which is why this, on the back cover of my book, means so much:

Sandra Postel on “Water is For Fighting Over”

In the many years since, I came to write a lot about water, and Sandra moved to New Mexico, we’d traded emails, but we’d never actually met in person until one warm day in the spring of 2014, in a dry sandy riverbed on the Sonora-Baja border in northern Mexico.

A crowd was gathering, as the people of San Luis waited for the water to arrive, the environmental “pulse flow”. A woman walked up to me, mistaking me for someone else, extending her hand in greeting: “Karl, nice to meet you, I’m Sandra Postel.”

“I’m not Karl,” I responded (it turned out we both were looking for the same Karl), “I’m John Fleck.” And for the next few hours, we shared the joy of the community of San Luis and the larger community of the Río Colorado as the water arrived in the normally dry riverbed. For all of us who were there, it was magical. As a journalist I live for the wonkish details of water measurement and legal minutiae, and then there are moments that will carry you away down the story. Such was the magic of the water flowing past San Luis. That day forms the rhetorical spine of my book, there at the beginning and there at the end.

So it’s a great joy to have Sandra’s kind words on the jacket.

Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West officially goes on sale Sept. 1, but I keep hearing from friends and colleagues who’ve pre-ordered from Amazon or Island Press and say copies are beginning to trickle out.

I’m happy (nay enthusiastic!) to point out the way Lake Mead keeps dropping, but it’s worth nothing this as well: Colorado River water use in Arizona, Nevada, and California this year is currently forecast at 7.006 million acre feet (source: pdf), well below the three states’ nominal legal entitlement of 7.5 million acre feet.

The current forecast:

• Arizona: 92 percent of its 2.8 maf entitlement
• California: 95 percent of its 4.4 maf entitlement
• Nevada: 84 percent of its 300,000 acre foot entitlement

This is important. The problem we face in the Colorado River Basin is that there’s less actual wet water in the system than there is legal entitlement to water. As long as people keep taking their full legal entitlement, the system keeps pushing toward a crash. These numbers reflect a conscious effort by Lower Basin water users and system managers to grapple with that reality.

In combination with a release of extra water this year from Lake Powell, upstream, the Lower Basin demand management underway now is enough to hold Lake Mead to a forecast drop of 1.6 feet in 2016 (source: pdf). That’s still a drop, but nothing like the 7 to 14 foot annual drop we’ve seen in the last few years. Not enough, but headed in the right direction.

Shoshone power plant, Glenwood Canyon, Colorado River

On what is apparently Colorado River Day (who decides such things?) I made a little pilgrimage this afternoon to see the Shoshone hydro plant, just up river from the little town of Glenwood Springs on Colorado’s west slope.

Shoshone has a unique place in the water management of the Colorado River Basin because of western water law’s “doctrine of prior appropriation”, which says that the earliest water users have first dibs on the water in times of scarcity.

Because Shoshone was built in the first decade of the 20th century, its water right predates much upstream water use, including transmountain diversions that take water from the west slope and ship it across the continental divide for use in Colorado’s populous front range communities of the Denver corridor.

As water gets low in the summer months, those upstream users have to shut down their diversions to ensure that there is enough water in the Colorado River for Shoshone to keep generating power. But here’s the cool thing, which makes Shoshone so interesting – it’s not a consumptive water right. Shoshone “uses” the water to generate electricity, then passes it along downstream. It’s not used up.

Which means that recreational and environmental values downstream of the plant are actually enhanced by Shoshone’s “use” of water, keeping more water in the Colorado River. From an analysis by Joe Reiter, Lauren Ris, and Doug Kenney:

One of the major beneficiaries of this arrangement is the environment.  The Colorado River is home to four endangered fish species: Humpback Chub, Pikeminnow, Razorback Sucker, and Bonytail…. The Shoshone water right helps meet the flow targets needed to maintain native fish habitat set by the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, a coalition of federal, state and private organizations within Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. It also, inadvertently, supports a successful rafting industry in Glenwood Springs. Approximately one dozen rafting outfitters operate on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon accounting for 72,000 trips a year and $2 million in direct revenue. Individuals make 50,000 private trips per year on the same stretch of river.

The rafters were out in force when I stopped by this afternoon, literally putting in immediately downstream from the Shoshone outfall:

rafters at Shoshone

Happy Colorado River Day.

Confluence of Colorado and Roaring Fork, Glenwood Springs

Eric Kuhn, General Manager of the Colorado River District, took me for a walk along his river yesterday evening, pointing out the muddy flow of the Colorado, coming in from the left, at its confluence with the Roaring Fork River – the clear water coming in under the railroad bridge.

This is on the state of Colorado’s west slope, near the headwaters of the Colorado River in the Rocky Mountains. The muddy look is from rains they’ve had in recent days in the Eagle River watershed. Eric said they can tell where the storms have been by the color of the runoff.