Charting a New Course for Water Supply in the Southwest
Water managers in Colorado River Basin states spent much of 2018 working on drought contingency plans.
The Santa Rosa Canal ferries Central Arizona Project water to farmland within the Maricopa Stanfield Irrigation and Drainage District, Oct. 23, 2018. (PHOTO: Mike Christy, Arizona Daily Star)
It’s been a busy year for water managers in the seven states that rely on the Colorado River. Luke Runyon is a reporter with KUNC who covers on the Colorado River Basin. AZPM’s Ariana Brocious chatted with Luke Runyon to recap what’s been happening and why it’s so important.
RUNYON: Late last year the federal government told state water leaders throughout the Colorado River basin that they needed to get a plan in place to deal with water scarcity. And they’ve been working on these drought contingency plans for years now. The feds said basically that they needed to hurry up and get them done. So this whole year during 2018, there’ve been these really tough discussions happening in places like Arizona, Colorado, California to figure out how to better deal with this gap that exists between water supplies and demand on the river. And to top it all off, it ended up being one of the hottest and driest years on record in parts of the basin, which just further underlined the need for a plan to deal with that new reality in the Southwest.
