LAS VEGAS — After five years of distressingly low rain and snowfall, a drought is hammering the West harder than ever, causing multibillion-dollar economic losses and prompting unprecedented measures in many states to cope with less water.
With the start of winter, little optimism exists that the coming months will fix the problems. Weather forecasts are equivocal.
Explosive population growth, environmental lawsuits to divert water for wildlife and below-average precipitation have put a strain on the big federal reservoirs that supply the West but were designed decades ago when the outlook was far different.
Drought map -- A map in Monday's Section A that showed drought conditions in the West incorrectly showed the course of the Missouri River. Its headwaters are in Montana and it joins the Mississippi River near St. Louis.
"The drought is still raging in many places," said John W. Keys III, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates the key dams in Western states. "Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Montana are in really bad shape. The Missouri River is at historic lows. The Platte River and Rio Grande are way down."
Nowhere is the situation more serious than the Colorado River basin, a key lifeline in seven states that provides 65% of Southern California's water.
Lake Mead has dropped by more than 90 feet in recent years, so low that the federal government might have to curtail water deliveries in the next few years. And the outlook remains grim, with official estimates giving only a 1 in 5 chance that the lake will refill by the end of the decade.
Lake Powell, the massive impoundment of the Colorado River behind Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, has dropped below the halfway mark for the first time since it was filled in the 1960s. Like a ring around a bathtub, a band of discolored rock for hundreds of miles graphically shows the progress of the drought.
Less water translates to less electricity production, as well. The massive generators at Glen Canyon have produced just 30% of their capacity this year.
Water agencies are no longer betting on Mother Nature: The Southern Nevada Water Authority approved a plan Thursday to extend its intake pipes 50 feet deeper into Lake Mead to prevent sucking air if lake levels continue to drop.
The situation in Arizona, where the state pays out $1 million a month for homeowners not to grow grass, is just as bad.
"We have depleted our reservoirs," said Herb Guenther, director of the state's Department of Water Resources. "We still have groundwater basins to fall back on."
