Western US Cities Cutting Water Use & Irrigation; Half Of 120 Western Ski Resorts Closed Early Or Never Opened This Year

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The Denver Board of Water Commissioners announced last week a series of water limits with a goal to cut area usage by 20 percent. Restaurant owners have been asked to only serve water if a diner requests it. Customers of Denver Water—a public water utility in the city—must limit lawn watering to no more than two days per week, and there are more cuts on the horizon, depending on forecasts. “The situation is quite serious,” Todd Hartman, a spokesperson for the utility, told NBC News. He added that although Denver Water’s reservoirs are roughly 80 percent full, the city can’t rely on snowpack like it typically does to refill them as levels drop. “We’re in such a dire situation that we could be coming back to the public in two or three months and saying you’re limited to one day a week.” In the northern Colorado city of Erie, residents and businesses were told earlier in March to halt all irrigation until early April, with a target to reduce usage by more than 45 percent. Officials threatened to shut off the tap altogether for violators.

Recreation has also been hard: More than half of the 120 ski resorts in the U.S. West either closed, will close early or never opened this year, according to a Reuters analysis. In Wyoming, one of the locations that did stay open experienced a slushy surprise last week as snow melted beneath skiers on the slopes. “It was a swimming pool. We should have been checking for floaties and not lift passes, it was pretty warm,” Dalan Adams, general manager of White Pine ski resort, told Wyoming Public Media.

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These events contribute to shrinking the Colorado River, which around 40 million people depend on. Representatives from the seven Western states in the basin have met several times over the past two years to determine how to divvy up the dwindling resources, but intense debates over who gets what have stalled the process despite the federal government stepping in, as my colleagues Jake Bolster and Wyatt Myskow reported in February. In January, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released a draft environmental impact statement that outlined proposed cuts to Colorado River water usage starting in 2027.

The agency gave states until October before it will impose more aggressive cuts. The outcome of these negotiations could have profound implications for water users (so … everyone in the Southwest), but are especially impactful for the agriculture and energy industries. The Bureau of Reclamation recently estimated that water managers in the basin must conserve an additional 1.7 million acre-feet of water to keep Lake Powell’s levels from falling so low they can’t spin the hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31032026/todays-climate-water-use-restrictions-snow-drought-western-us/