Lake Powell has reached its lowest water level ever recorded, causing concerns for the 40 million people in two countries-- the U.S. and Mexico -- who rely on the Colorado River system, including residents of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
The lake's water levels fell to 3,519.91 feet above sea level, surpassing a previous record set in April 2023. And the troubling milestone at Lake Powell comes a week after Lake Mead, the river’s other main reservoir, hit its own historic low.
"If you add the two of these reservoirs together, the last time the joint contents were this low was in 1957, before there even was a Lake Powell. These are truly unprecedented," Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist and the director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, told ABC News. "We are in completely new territory."
The Colorado River supports seven states' drinking water and more than that, it provides water for agriculture, municipal supply, and hydropower.
Federal officials warned in April that a "major intervention" is required to prevent reaching the level where turbines would cease generating electricity by the year's end. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released a 10-year plan to manage the low water levels and potential drought impacts on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
As one measure, they will not release cool water from one of the Colorado River's primary reservoirs this year, prioritizing struggling hydropower production over the protection of a threatened native fish downstream.
Water managers are facing pressure to reduce deliveries, impacting agriculture and necessitating creative solutions for water security.
"What's really happened in this last year acutely is that the flows are so low and given how we've been operating the system, we're getting to these record lows that honestly were not anticipated as recently as a year ago, and so it's kind of a critical situation on the river," said Sharon Megdal, director of the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center. "It's appropriate to use the words critical, crisis because we haven't been there before since these two reservoirs had been filled."
