/Photo by Luke Runyon/KUNC
By Luke Runyon | KUNC
COAL CREEK CANYON, Colo. – The Colorado River is short on water, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at a slate of proposed water projects in the river’s Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
The river and its tributaries provide water for 40 million people in the Southwest. For the past 20 years or so, demand for water has outstripped the supply, causing its largest reservoirs to decline.
In the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2012 Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, you can pinpoint when the lines crossed somewhere near 2002. It’s a well-documented and widely accepted imbalance.
That harsh reality – the river’s water is promised to too many people – has prompted all sorts of activity and agreements within the seven Western states that rely on it. That activity includes controversial efforts in some Upper Basin states to tap every available drop before things get worse.
