Arizona is gearing up for the first-ever “Tier 1” shortage on the Colorado River in 2022, which will trigger significant cuts to the state’s annual allocation from its most important water resource.  

As daunting as it sounds, the vast majority of citizens and businesses will not be affected, state water leaders said during a Colorado River Preparedness briefing last week.

Arizona is also well prepared to weather expected shortages the next few years, and is in the process of developing the next steps to protect and augment the river’s supplies as the drought persists, said the state’s top two water leaders. They held the briefing to update the public about what to expect, what the current conditions are and plans for the future. 

“This is a day we knew would come at some point and we’ve been preparing for this moment for at least a couple of decades,” said Ted Cooke, general manager of the , the entity that delivers the river water to the populous dry inland deserts including metro Phoenix, metro Tucson and Pinal County. 

“We have a plan. It’s called the Drought Contingency Plan, and we’re implementing that plan,” said Cooke, who held the briefing with Tom Buschatzke, the director of the .

One of longest droughts on record

The two seasoned water leaders have been shepherding Arizona through one of the longest, driest droughts on record.

Now, in its 21st year, the drought is causing levels to drop at the Colorado River’s two “storage tanks” — Lake Powell for the upper states and Lake Mead for the lower states and Mexico. The Colorado River basin states that feed off the river are Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.  

Over the past two to three years, the drought has “intensified significantly,” said Daniel Bunk, chief of the Boulder Canyon Operations Office for the U.S. , who detailed the current conditions at the briefing. 

As of April 26, Lake Powell was down to 35 percent full and Lake Mead, 38 percent. When combined with water storage in other facilities, the system storage is at 43 percent, almost 10 percent lower than last year, Bunk said. 

Based on the hydrology, it is “highly likely” that the BOR will announce a Tier 1 shortage for 2022. This would require Arizona to reduce its use by 18 percent, or a total of 512,000 acre-feet, borne almost entirely by the CAP system. 

The results show a high likelihood of Tier 1 reductions in 2023 as well as an increasing risk of more drastic cuts with Tier 2 conditions in the near future. 

Most severe cuts on central Arizona farmers and ranchers

Reductions will fall largely to central Arizona agricultural users, which have low priority rights when it comes to river supplies. Cities and tribes have high priority rights and will not be affected by a Tier 1 reduction. Tier 2 cuts would be more widespread among users in order to shore up levels at Lake Mead.

While cuts next year will be “painful,” mitigation efforts, including funding from public agencies, large corporations and nonprofits are lessening the blow, Buschatzke said. 

Hardest hit, the agriculture industry in Pinal County received funding to install new groundwater infrastructure to help augment the loss of river water. 

Agreement to leave water in storage lakes is working 

The efforts came out of the historic passed by an act of U.S. Congress in 2019 to protect water levels in the two lakes. Arizona, the six other states, Mexico and the U.S. entered into the DCP, which mandates how water cuts will take place when the lakes drop to certain levels, or tiers. 

Included in the DCP is a new water level, “Tier Zero,” for extra protection. Under Tier Zero, if the water level dips below 1090 feet above sea level, reductions are triggered to leave water in the lake. In 2020 and currently, Lake Mead has been in Tier Zero. A Tier 1 shortage occurs when Mead drops to 1075 feet above sea level. 

In order to get the massive agreement sealed, public agencies, private corporations and NGOs contributed tens of millions of dollars to leave water in the lake for conservation projects and to provide aid to Pinal County farmers. Water users agreed to share some of the pain by either leaving water supplies in the lake or sharing excess water with others with lower water rights. 

Because of the DCP, water supplies are now secure for the next few years, Buschatzke said. 

“Together these efforts reduce the pain of the near-term reductions while addressing risks of future shortages,” he said. 

Next challenge: finding new water supplies 

Now, Buschatzke and Cooke are back co-leading the next drought plan negotiations. 

They are co-chairing a statewide committee, the , to start hammering out Arizona’s part of new DCP guidelines in 2026. 

More substantial cuts could be on the horizon. Pressure is on to build new infrastructure to conserve water and find other supplies beyond the river to relieve the burden on “America’s Nile.”

For additional information and updates about Arizona water efforts, visit: or .  

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Arizona’s top water officials spoke to the manufacturing community Wednesday about what’s being done to protect the state’s water supplies for future growth in this new era of climate change. 

In fact, there is the potential for the state to experience its first-ever water shortage next year, they said. A 20-year drought with no end in sight is shrinking the Southwest’s most important water resource, the mighty Colorado River. 

For now, there’s enough water to support the state’s blooming industry base, said Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR), and Ted Cooke, general manager of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), during a virtual “breakfast” meeting of the (AMC), the voice of the manufacturing sector. 

Proactive conservation efforts over the past seven years including a seven-state-plus-Mexico drought plan to conserve and share resources have resulted in an extra 40 feet of water in Lake Mead, the “storage tank” for Colorado River supplies, they said. 

“In the near term, our residents can be assured that their water supplies are more reliable and secure and the economies and the state supported by this Colorado River can thrive and are more secure,” Bushatzke said.

Potential for state’s first-ever shortage in 2022 

That doesn’t mean big challenges don’t lie ahead. But they are nothing new for Arizona, which uses less water today than it did in the 1950s because of new technologies and methods that “get more use out of every drop,” Buschatzke said. 

As the Colorado diminishes, Arizona must invest in new technology and innovation and find new resources for water other than the river, they said. 

Next year, Arizona is anticipating its first-ever shortage declaration on the Colorado River. The shortage will result in a substantial cut to Arizona’s share of the river, with reductions falling largely to central Arizona agricultural users.

Currently, the river is operating in a “Tier Zero” status, requiring the state to contribute 192,000 acre-feet of Arizona’s 2.8 million acre-foot annual entitlement to Lake Mead. This contribution is coming entirely from the CAP system. 

Based on the current hydrology, it is likely that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will elevate the shortage level to a “Tier 1” in 2022. This would require Arizona to reduce uses by a total of 512,000 acre-feet, again, borne almost entirely by the CAP system. 

Cities and tribes, which are considered “high priority” users when it comes to Colorado River water, will not be affected by the cuts during a Tier 1 shortage. If the state dips into the next lower level, “Tier 2,” cuts to water allocations would be more widespread among users in order to leave water in Lake Mead. 

River will continue to be resource for generations to come 

While there are “big challenges” ahead and less water coming to Arizona from the Colorado River, it will continue to be a vital source of water for generations to come, said Cooke, of the CAP, which delivers Colorado River water to the populous desert regions in the center of the state including the the Sun Corridor mega region that stretches from metro Phoenix to metro Tucson.

Clock ticking on new drought plan for 2026

With the updated DCP doing its job, Buschatzke and Cooke are once again embarking on the years-long process to renegotiate a new DCP in 2026. They will be working with not only stakeholders within Arizona, but officials in Mexico and the six other Colorado Basin states: California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. 

As they did in 2019, Buschatzke and Cooke are leading a statewide committee, the new , to negotiate the new plan. The committee is nearly a carbon copy of the previous 40-member DCP committee. include municipal and other water officials, tribes, agricultural groups, homebuilder associations, lawmakers, and the Governor’s Office. 

Augmentation council working to find new water supplies

Another committee,the , is charged with finding new water resources beyond the Colorado River and targeting conservation projects.  

“There’s no silver bullet” but manufacturers can feel confident that Arizona is well prepared for the coming years, Cooke said. 

“The important thing to remember is, we have a plan. It’s called the Drought Contingency Plan. Lots of people were involved to make this work and while this plan is being implemented, we’re working on the next plan,” he said. 

Follow what’s happening with drought on new website  

All of the basin states are struggling with drought. Arizona has seen some level of drought at least since 2002. Last year was the calendar year on record for the state and the driest since 1956. 

To better serve stakeholders, decision makers and the public, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System recently launched a major redesign of . 

This one-stop resource has several features including:

• Drought conditions down to the and level, including current conditions, key indicators of drought, outlooks and forecasts, water supply impacts, historical drought conditions, and more. You can also access curated lists of drought early warning resources for and the entire .
• Historical data and maps, including an where viewers can compare three historical drought datasets side by side down to the county level: U.S. Drought Monitor data going back to 2000, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) data going back to 1895, and paleoclimate data from tree-ring analysis going back to the year 0 for some regions of the U.S.

By Sector section, which shows drought impacts on different economic sectors, such as agriculture, energy, water utilities, and tourism and recreation.

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Drought is not something that is uncommon in the Southwest United States. However, Arizona has stood out in taking active measures to improve the use of the state’s water resources.

One of the largest supplies of water that the state has access to is groundwater, which makes up. The second largest source is the Colorado River, which makes up 36% of the water supply. With the largest amount of water supply for the state coming from groundwater, it makes it a vital resource for the state. By and large most of the water used within Arizona is by the agricultural sector, which accounts for 73%, followed by municipal use at 21%, and the industrial sector rounds it out at 5%.

Groundwater is composed of the water resources beneath the surface of the earth. It is found in natural reservoirs, or aquifers. The sediments in aquifers are filled with different amounts of water, which means some areas can contain more water than others. If there are mass amounts of water being pumped out of aquifers, it can cause damage to the land. Additionally, there can be runoff in shallow groundwater and heavy metals in deeper groundwater.

Early water management

In 1980, Arizona passed the, which protects the users of groundwater and works to decrease the reliance on groundwater statewide, with a focus on heavily populated areas.  

Another program in Arizona working towards water conservation turned 35 years old this year: the Central Arizona Project. This diversion canal is a 336-mile diversion system that brings water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona. Since its implementation, the CAP has come to provide the state’s and serves a total of 80% of the state’s population. 

There has been a slew of proposed reforms recently by both Democrats and Republicans in the state Legislature regarding the use of groundwater and its potential overuse in unregulated rural areas. 

Both House Bills 2895 and 2896, two bills introduced during the 2020 state legislative session that were introduced in an attempt to regulate the usage of groundwater, failed to pass in the pandemic-shortened legislative session.   

Today’s approach to drought

With a history of drought, the state has also attempted to craft assurances that its citizens will not be endangered by a lack of water. 

Arizona in 2019 adopted the (DCP), a multi-state effort with Mexico to keep Lake Mead from falling to drastically low levels. The DCP means collaborative action in order to protect the sustainability of the Colorado River as a water resource for the 40 million people who depend on it. 

The creation of the DCP when representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states signed the Colorado River Compact ensuring that the river would flow to all the states in the Basin and Mexico. 

In 1956, the Colorado River Storage Project Act was signed into law for the construction and regulation of reservoirs in the Upper Basin states. Since the passage of the Storage Project Act there have been many subsequent bills passed to add additional efforts to the storage project plan. However, in 2018 Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman gave the lower basin states a deadline of January 31, 2019 to create the DCP. 

The DCP that was created has many moving parts, which made it longer to compromise for creating an agreement.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said about conservation efforts, “It is not easy to achieve that outcome while respecting the unique rights of each State, various Tribes and Mexico to Colorado River water.” 

After months of negotiations, the seven different states finally agreed on a plan to cut back the usage of the Colorado River without lasting impacts to any one state.

In January 2019, Governor Doug Ducey signed an executive order creating the which has worked to further the purpose of ensuring a long-term sustainable water supply for Arizona.

Arizona’s water management programs and long-term planning have made it possible for there to be of water stored underground to be used in the future if the need ever arises. This amount is the equivalent of water services for the city of Phoenix for 30 years at the current rate. 

Gov. Doug Ducey earlier this year said that the issue of water conservation should be planned for the long term.

“We don’t want to deal with this one generation at a time,” the governor said. “It should be focused, strategic and ongoing in terms of water innovation.”

U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has echoed this sentiment saying, “Arizona’s future depends on securing our water supply. Our legislation ensures Arizona has the resources to address drought conditions and restore our waterways so we can continue expanding opportunities across our state.”

State business leaders have talked about the issue of the state’s conservation efforts being the key to continuing economic success. 

Todd Reeve, director of Business for Water Stewardship, recently spoke on the topic, saying, “We want to be in Arizona forever to invest in communities and jobs and we need to have certainty around water in the long term.”

Taylor Hersch is an undergraduate at Arizona State University and an Arizona �������� Foundation Junior Fellow.

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Arizona’s engineering masterpiece, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), is celebrating 35 years of delivering Colorado River water to the state’s populous regions. 

The decades-long struggle to get the canal project approved and then built in some of Arizona’s most unforgiving landscape, is legend. But its economic impact cannot be overstated. 

Among the fruits of its labor? The booming Sonoran Corridor megaregion that encompasses metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson. 

“Central Arizona Project is the largest water provider in Arizona. It’s instrumental in bringing over half of Arizona’s entitlement of Colorado into Central and Southern Arizona where, with few exceptions, there’s not a lot of surface water,” General Manager Ted Cooke said during a episode celebrating the anniversary and the amazing feat of construction.  

Since making its first water delivery in 1985 to farmers in the Harquahala Valley Irrigation District west of downtown Phoenix, the winding canal has generated more than $2 trillion for the state’s economy, according to an conducted by the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Today, the canal system’s water deliveries generate approximately $100 billion annually into the state’s economy. 

CAP’s supply of water to its customers in 2017 alone is estimated at annual employment of nearly 1.6 million jobs.

The top five sectors that have benefited most since CAP’s water deliveries began are government, healthcare, real estate and travel, retail and construction, the ASU analysis shows.  

Decades of struggle to get congressional approval 

Prior to CAP, inland farmers had been using precious groundwater, so the ability to use surface water supplies was important not only for them, but for the entire state. The first delivery heralded a new era for water use and sustainability.

Efforts to get the project approved started in the mid 1940s, Cooke said. Arizona finally succeeded in 1968. But not without a cost. It had to agree to hold only “junior” priority rights to the river, meaning it suffers deeper cuts in water supplies than other states when shortages occur.

Engineers from ‘70s and ‘80s ahead of their time 

Finally, in 1973, CAP construction began just outside of Lake Havasu. It took 12 years to build the first 100 miles of the canal system through unforgiving landscape, including drilling through 22 miles of Buckskin Mountain. 

“It meanders — on purpose — over those many miles to take advantage of the terrain,” Cooke said. “Sometimes the canal has to be above the ground and sometimes it has to be below ground with less than 5 inches per minute of decline before it has to be pumped again to take advantage of the natural terrain to get the water to move.

“It’s an engineering marvel that was done in the 1970s and early 1980s. It just boggles the mind.”

Water policy leadership role   

CAP has also been a major player and influencer in water decisions including a leading role in the seven-state-and-Mexico drought contingency plan (DCP) by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year. 

At the time, the state was facing a water crisis with the mighty river diminishing under the heat of a 19-year drought, the longest in Arizona recorded history. 

The legally-binding DCP requires water holders like CAP to cut back on water supplies and store up water in the river’s two main holding “tanks,” Lake Mead and Lake Powell. 

CAP and its governing board, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, contributed leadership, funding and expertise to push the legislation through. 

Cooke and Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke, co-led the wieldy, often contentious, 40-member statewide steering committee of competing water interests that was charged with negotiating Arizona’s piece of the DCP.

With the DCP in place, a water crisis for the Southwest was averted. Now, state leaders are starting to prepare for the next DCP in 2026, and to find other ways to shore up water for the future. To view more about this engineering marvel, go to:

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Central Arizona Project, the engineering marvel that delivers water throughout much of Arizona, held a behind-the-scenes tour this week to offer system stakeholders and members of the media a rare opportunity to descend into the temporarily empty canal for an up-close look at preventive maintenance on the Salt River Siphon.

The siphon is an 8,700-foot-long pipe, 21 feet in diameter, that runs as deep as 30 feet beneath a portion of the Salt River, carrying approximately 75 percent of all CAP water deliveries. The siphon sits approximately half-way along the length of the CAP system.

The siphon is responsible for a $90 billion contribution to the Arizona economy, according to CAP.

Gravity carries water through the siphon beneath the Salt River, and the water’s momentum takes it back to the surface as it flows to the Salt Gila Pumping Plant in Mesa.

Maintenance began Oct. 30, 2019 and included a partial recoating of the siphon to help protect against corrosion and erosion — the first recoating since 2001. Similar maintenance is expected to take place again in eight to 10 years.

CAP Board President Lisa Atkins said she thanked Salt River Project and the cities of Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler and Tucson for their assistance and collaboration in preparing for the partial service outage resulting from the maintenance project. Storage was maximized downstream from the Salt Gila Pumping Plant in preparation for the disruption.

“Without them working so closely with us — with CAP staff — on the planning phases of this project, today would not be possible,” Atkins said.

CAP General Manager Ted Cooke said planning for the six-week project began more than three years ago.

“It worked the way it was supposed to,” Cooke said of the steps taken to prepare customers and store enough water to avoid disrupting water delivery during the maintenance. Cooke said CAP’s contractors on the project worked round-the-clock in order to finish the project on schedule.

In addition to the Salt River Siphon, CAP maintains nine other siphons that run beneath the Agua Fria, New, Gila and Santa Cruz rivers.

With Salt River Siphon maintenance complete, regular water deliveries resumed Wednesday.

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