We all like the rain — it’s a welcome respite in the desert. It freshens the air and cleans the streets.
But it has only a marginal effect on Lake Mead. What Lake Mead and other Western reservoirs need is snowpack — deep snowpack that melts gradually and feeds the reservoirs.
Specifically, Lake Mead needs snow melt from the Upper Colorado River Basin. And while the snowpack is above average for the year, climatologists are wary because the earth’s crust is warming. So, not only is there generally less snow, there is generally less snow melt that feeds Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
As Desert Research Institute regional climatologist Dan McEvoy told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, even one extremely wet year won’t be enough to compensate for the 20-plus years of severe drought along the river.
And the general consensus from experts is that the reservoirs aren’t going to magically rise from their record lows and refill in a time of changing climate.
So if the rain has a marginal effect and the snowpack and snow melt patterns have changed, what’s the answer?
Long-term, it’s probably even much more stricter conservation and desalination. It won’t be long before you will be mandated to have low-flow shower heads and low-flow toilets. Low-flow dishwashers? Forget washing your car in the driveway even if you abandoned that curiously archaic concept years ago.
And you will probably pay more for the water you do use.
And we will need to spend trillions — if not quadrillions — on desalination. The Arizona governor proposed a $1 billion desalination plan in 2022. San Diego already gets some of its water from desalination. Oddly, though nothing yet from Nevada leadership.
As a recent story at Vox.com pointed out too, we need better and different infrastructure to capture rainwater and snow melt from flooding. Tack on a few more trillions.
The recent flooding in California has filled smaller reservoirs but done little to fill major reservoirs because it’s been too much rain in too short of time. Once the warmed earth is saturated, the extra water merely floods.
“We are in the middle of a flood emergency and also in the middle of a drought emergency,” California Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth said Wednesday in a media briefing.
There you have it. We live in an overpopulated world with a changing climate. But in the meantime, enjoy the rain even if it’s drops in the bucket of the long-term drought.
