The Bureau of Reclamation is taking emergency action to protect Lake Powell, the Upper Colorado River Basin’s largest reservoir, and its infrastructure in the face of ongoing drought.
The agency announced on April 17 that it would release between 600-thousand and one million acre feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah state line over the course of the next year.
In addition, Reclamation will reduce the amount of water it sends from Lake Powell through Glen Canyon Dam, decreasing flows downstream through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. Through September 2026, the agency will reduce its annual release volume from about 7.5 million acre feet of water to just 6 million acre feet.
The drought contingency actions come in response to a water year that has been incredibly dire for the Western United States and the Colorado River Basin. Snowpack has been at record lows for much of the winter, which is bad news for a region that relies on snowmelt for much of its water use. The forecast for runoff into Lake Powell from the entire Upper Basin is forecast to be just 23% of normal.
The agency estimates that these combined actions will boost Lake Powell’s elevation by 54 feet over the course of the year, bringing it to 3,500 feet in April 2027. Currently, Lake Powell’s elevation is about 3,528 feet. 3,490 feet is the elevation at which hydropower can no longer be produced at Glen Canyon Dam. Any lower, and water will not be able to enter the hydroelectric turbines. Instead, the water has to go through what’s called “river outlet works,” which are tunnels that bypass the turbines to get the water downstream to the Colorado River.
Seth Arens, a hydrologist at the Western Water Assessment, said Glen Canyon Dam was not designed to have the river outlet works as the primary way to get water out of the reservoir.
“When the Bureau of Reclamation has used those river outlet tubes, most of the times they've used them, there've been some damage to those tubes,” he said. “They've had to repair damages after relatively short uses, you know, a scale of weeks dumping water out of those.”
Environmental attorney Chris Winter said it’s clear Reclamation has to take emergency actions to protect its own infrastructure. But, he said the plan leaves a lot of uncertainty and unanswered questions.
“We're not going to be able to release a whole bunch of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir (next year) because that water will have been released this year, and it's not going to refill if we get another dry year,” he said. “Releases of water from Upper Basin storage units, that’s like a one-time thing, unless we happen to get some wet years in the future.”
Winter also serves as the executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at CU Boulder’s School of Law.
Flaming Gorge is currently about 82% full. Reclamation estimates that its plan will bring the reservoir down to about 59% of its full capacity over the next year. Other Upper Basin reservoirs are not part of the plan at the moment, due to poor forecasted inflows and low water levels. Blue Mesa Reservoir in Western Colorado is currently 47% full and Navajo Lake on the Colorado-New Mexico state line is 63% full.
Winter said reducing flows out of Glen Canyon Dam could also lead to legal issues. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico have not reached a deal with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada on how to allocate water—and take cuts to usage in the midst of a changing climate—over the next 20 years. On top of that, reducing flows this year would mark a fulcrum point: the first year that the amount of water at Lees Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, falls below the averages set by the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
Arizona has already indicated that it is prepared to take legal action over the Colorado River.
“I think that this moment of shortage right now, the short-term situation combined with the inability of the basins to reach agreement on a long-term set of operating guidelines, those things might converge to increase the risk that we get a lawsuit from the Lower Basin to enforce the 1922 compact, and that lawsuit would likely end up in the United States Supreme Court,” Winter said.
“A lawsuit in the Supreme Court is not going to solve the crisis we’re in right now, and it’s likely going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years and years and years to get resolved.”
Impacts of Reclamation’s plans
In its announcement, Reclamation acknowledged that its drought contingency plans will affect the entire basin. Reducing flows out of Glen Canyon Dam will speed up the decline of Lake Mead, with the agency estimating that there could be a 40% reduction in the Hoover Dam’s hydropower generating capacity as early as this fall. It’s also predicting that its plan could affect boating at upstream reservoirs, as well as fishing and rafting conditions across the basin.
Winter said the basin needs to focus urgently on adapting to the reality that there’s less water available than there was 100 years ago—due to climate change and over-allocation.
“We're not really getting traction on that very difficult question of where we're going to reduce overall consumptive use in the system and how that pain over the long term is gonna be allocated and how we're going to get there,” he said.
Arens agreed.
“Ultimately, it's going to take relatively, perhaps even draconian cuts in water (use), at least on a short- to medium-term basis to stabilize the system, unless there's some major change in how we think about the system operating,” he said.
Beyond the basin’s two largest reservoirs, water users are concerned about the knock-on effects of drought this summer particularly increased wildfire risk.
“It's hard to imagine it not being a bad to exceptionally bad wildfire summer,” Arens said, adding that high temperatures and dry soils will likely contribute to wildfire conditions.
“It stayed so warm at low elevations that it didn't kill plants this year,” he said. “So there's probably going to be places in the West that are like that, that actually do already have increased vegetative growth because stuff was growing all winter when it shouldn't be growing.”
Federal forecasters are predicting significant wildland fire danger across much of Utah and Colorado in June and July.
Winter said there will also likely be economic impacts to the drought.
“I also think that the agricultural communities on (Colorado’s) Western Slope are going to be dealing with a lot of pain because of the reduced water usage that has effects throughout rural economies all across the state,” he said.
“It can impact our outdoor recreation economies with lower flows in our rivers and streams. There's a whole host of very serious effects for our economy and way of life here in Colorado on both our Front Range and the Western Slope.”
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
