PAGE, Arizona -- At five years and counting, the drought that has parched much of the West is getting much harder to shrug off as a blip. Those who worry most about the future of the West -- politicians, scientist, business leaders, city planners and environmentalists -- are increasingly realizing that a world of eternally blue skies and meager mountain snowpacks may not be a passing phenomenon but rather the return of a harsh climatic norm.
Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West may have been based on a colossal miscalculation. That shift is shaking many assumptions about how the West is run. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the states that depend on the Colorado River, are preparing for the possibility of water shortages for the first time since the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s to control the river's flow.
"Before this drought, we had 20 years of a wet cycle and 20 years of the most growth ever," said John D'Antonio, the New Mexico state engineer, who is scrambling to find new water supplies for Albuquerque suburbs that did not exist a generation ago.
The latest blow was paltry snowfall during March in the Rocky Mountains, pushing down runoff projections for the Colorado River this year to 55 percent of average. Snowmelt is the lifeblood of the river, which provides municipal water from Denver to Los Angeles and irrigates millions of acres of farmland. The period since 1999 is officially the driest in the Colorado River's 98 years of recorded history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Some of the biggest water worries are focused on Lake Powell, the vast blue diamond of deep water that government engineers created in one of the driest and most remote areas of the country beginning in the 1950s. From its inception, Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest artificial lake, after Lake Mead in Nevada, was a powerful symbol across the West. Some saw it as a statement of human will and knowhow, others of arrogance.
Lake Powell, part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, has lost nearly 60 percent of its water and is about the size it was in 1973, when it wa still filling up. White cliffs, bleached by salts from the lake, tower 10 stories above the water. Elsewhere, retreating waters have exposed mountains of sediment.
Daniel McCool, a professor of political science at the University of Utah and director of the American West Center, said Lake Powell is the barometer of the drought because what has happened here is as much about politics, economics and the interlocking system of rules and rights called the law of the river as it is about meteorology. If water levels continue to fall, Lake Powell will be unable to generate electricity as early as 2007 or sooner, some hydrologists say. Even now, the lake's managers say, it would take a decade of historically normal rainfall to refill it.
"If we're only in the middle of this drought, then Lake Powell might be very close to some very dramatic problems," said Dr. John Dohrenwend, a retired geologist for the Geological Survey.
Insufficient water for the Glen Canyon Dam turbines would be only the beginning. At that point, much of the lake bottom would be exposed, creating a vast environment for noxious weeds like tamarisk and thistle. The next step in the spiral would come at what is called "dead pool", where decades' worth of agricultural chemicals at the lake bottom would being mixing more actively with the reactivated river. The question then, environmentalists say, is what would happen to the Grand Canyon, just south of the dam.
OPTIONS FOR SAVING WATER ON THE COLORADO
* Create a water bank in Lake Mead shared by Arizona, California and Nevada, and require the three states to cooperate.
* Crack down on farmers who deliberately overuse their water entitlement and on unauthorized users who tap into the river.
* Shift water storage from Lake Mead, where temperatures reach 120 degrees, to the high-elevation Lake Powell, where lower temperatures cause less evaporation, or other upstream reservoirs.
* Construct off-stream reservoirs to capture excess water flows and flash floods.
* Emphasize desalination technologies. Start up the Yuma Desalting Plant, built to satisfy the U.S.-Mexico treaty on Colorado River water, and eliminate polluted agricultural runoff flowing into Mexico.
* Encourage cities to pool money to pay to install water-saving technologies in agricultural areas.