A 20-year, climate change-fueled megadrought has dealt a double blow to Blue Mesa this summer. The dry conditions have led to lower levels directly, but the lake is also hurting from drought problems in other states.
For the first time, the federal government is taking emergency action by taking water from Blue Mesa to help out another reservoir — Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. Loken said the withdrawals hurt more given Blue Mesa’s low water levels.
“Since we’re already so low, we’re barely hanging on by our fingertips to try and stay open,” Loken said. “You take eight feet of water, and suddenly we gotta shut the doors and move everything out to deeper water. And there's nothing that we can do about it.”
Michael Elizabeth Sakas/CPR News
This might not be the last time Blue Mesa sends water to Lake Powell
Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., hit its lowest level ever recorded earlier this summer.
Loken doesn’t know if the emergency water releases are the primary reason the marina’s season was cut short. But each time the levels in the lake drop by a foot, he loses 10 feet of usable boat ramp.
For Loken, this is a lot of water to lose during one of the busiest periods at the lake.
He’s afraid that Lake Powell will need more water from Blue Mesa if the drought doesn’t improve.
Michael Elizabeth Sakas/CPR News
“The question is, are they just going to release whatever we get? That would become a very big problem for everyone around here,” he said.
The states that share Colorado River water agreed to this plan in 2019. Low levels in Lake Powell would trigger an emergency release from three reservoirs upstream.
The water taken from Blue Mesa is being used to make sure hydroelectric power turbines at Lake Powell can keep spinning and generating electricity for millions of people in the West, including customers in Colorado.
John McClow, a lawyer for the Upper Gunnison River Conservancy District, said this scenario is what Blue Mesa and the other reservoirs were built for in the 1960s — drought emergencies, not recreation. It’s a bank of water that states can tap when they need to.
Michael Elizabeth Sakas/CPR News
The release of water from Blue Mesa was disruptive for recreation there
Although the water in Blue Mesa has always been earmarked for Lake Powell if Colorado needed help meeting its legal obligation to send more flow to downstream states, McClow said the timing of the release was unnecessarily disruptive. He wishes the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation would have waited to take the water until October when lake tourism starts slowing down.
Erik Knight, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist, said that while the timing of the water releases might have hurt the lake, it improved rafting and fishing downstream of Blue Mesa, including parts of the Gunnison River that were so low that commercial rafting was likely to have been canceled.
“It's kind of a trade-off in our viewpoint,” Knight said.
Knight said the Bureau could take more water from Blue Mesa to protect hydroelectricity production at Lake Powell if snowpack and runoff remain low in 2022.
“Obviously we need to be ready to do something,” he said. “And so we've done a little bit so far, but no one can really answer the question as to whether or not it’s going to be enough.”
Knight hopes there's more snow in the mountains next year so that the drought won't be as dire. But he realizes that hope might not be enough. He said the people who rely on the Colorado River might need to adapt the system to a warmer and drier future — one its creators never imagined.
Michael Elizabeth Sakas/CPR News
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Drought-Hit Blue Mesa Reservoir Losing 8 Feet Of Water To Save Lake Powell Has A Marina Hurting - Colorado Public Radio
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