\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
By Rusty Childress | Rio Verde<\/p>\n
Every Arizonan has seen the headlines: \u201cColorado River can\u2019t meet demand.\u201d \u201cExperts call for more cutbacks.\u201d The stories sound serious \u2014 but they stop short of telling the truth that matters most.<\/p>\n
If Lake Mead falls just a few dozen feet lower, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) \u2014 the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix, Tucson and Pinal County farms \u2014 won\u2019t face \u201creductions.\u201d It will shut down.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not politics. It\u2019s physics.<\/p>\n
Lake Mead sits behind Hoover Dam, the upstream gate for the Lower Colorado River. When the lake\u2019s surface drops below roughly 895 feet, Hoover\u2019s outlet tunnels rise above the waterline. At that point, gravity \u2014 the force that moves every drop to Arizona \u2014 stops working. The canal runs dry.<\/p>\n
Engineers call this \u201cdead pool.\u201d It\u2019s the moment the Colorado River ceases to function as a delivery system. No policy, negotiation, or compact can make water flow uphill.<\/p>\n
If Hoover reaches dead pool, Phoenix and Tucson lose about half their imported supply. Power generation at Hoover stops, taking 2,000 megawatts off the grid. Reservoirs downstream stagnate. Fish die. The delta in Mexico disappears.<\/p>\n
Yet most coverage softens the crisis with words like shortage, cutbacks and resilience. The truth is simpler: without enough head at Hoover Dam, there is no CAP.<\/p>\n
Some promise desalination or new pipelines will save us. But none exist today \u2014 and none can replace gravity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s time for plain language. The Colorado River isn\u2019t just over-allocated. It\u2019s dying. And if we keep avoiding the word \u201ccollapse,\u201d Arizona will be unprepared when the taps run dry.<\/p>\n
Please submit comments at\u00a0yourvalley.net\/letters<\/a> or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org<\/a>.\u00a0We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our\u00a0Civility Guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rusty Childress | Rio Verde Every Arizonan has seen the headlines: \u201cColorado River can\u2019t meet demand.\u201d \u201cExperts…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":296338,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,1589,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-296337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-az","11":"tag-phoenix","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115359190136984146","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}