Chatting on the sidelines of last week’s Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference in Boulder, Doug Kenney had a great suggestion. We need something along the lines of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous nuclear doomsday clock for Colorado River water management. Doug’s comment came when I was grabbing some quotes for my newspaper story on the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement that releases from Lake Powell will be curtailed beginning Oct. 1.
“This is kind of like the Colorado River doomsday clock,” Kenney said. We didn’t really settle on the specifics of how many minutes closer to midnight we should set the clock after Friday’s Bureau announcement, and I’m no graphic artist. But I’ll leave you with an update of my sort-of-monthly graph of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, with estimated 2013 and 2014 water year-end numbers added:
Colorado River storage
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