FRISCO, CO ‒ Stretching out in their beach chairs as the temperature climbed toward 70 degrees, Seth and Renee McLaughlin watched their three kids play in the sand on what was supposed to be a family ski trip.
Booked last November, their spring break vacation to Colorado's mountains required a hard shift in plans following ahistorically warm and dry winter: Instead of zipping down the slopes, the couple watched their kids sift sand into colorful toy buckets on the shores of Lake Dillon.
"It's obviously frustrating. You want to go skiing, and usually we ski until May, and instead we're at the beach," said Seth McLaughlin, 44, a nonprofit consultant. "I feel bad for the folks who spent tens of thousands of dollars to come on vacation here."
The McLaughlins' ruined vacation is a harbinger of what climatologists say will be a dangerously dry summer across the West. In many areas, all-important snowfall has been half of normal, with even hotter, drier temperatures expected in the coming months.
Western water woes deepen, raising drought fears
Much of the nationis in a drought already, but the headwaters of the Colorado River is among the driest places, along with south Texas and all of Florida. Alarmed civic officials across the West have already begun ordering restrictions on watering lawns, cleaning cars and even whether restaurant patrons get served glasses of water.
"We are already assuming our yard is going to be dead this year," said Renee McLaughlin, 44, a physician assistant. "And we're talking to the kids about taking five-minute showers."
The McLaughlins live in a Colorado city that has not yet ordered water restrictions, but many neighboring communities have already begun implementing them. Some ski areas are also closing early due to the heat and lack of snow.
Longtime Western water expert Brad Udall said it's hard to put into words just how bad things are. He said the early ski area closures will likely be followed by ranchers selling off cattle, and then skies darkened by wildfire smoke as dry vegetation burns.
For more than two decades, Udall has been studying how climate change is altering the West's water resources. He said 2026 may go down as the worst year for Colorado River flows in recorded history.
"It's really grim. It's horrific," said Udall, a senior climate scientist at Colorado State University's Colorado Water Center. "The impacts are going to be everywhere, throughout the economy and personally. You will feel this personally as it happens."
Based on previous years, a water shortage across the West could have drastic implications for food prices as crops dry up and cattle go thirsty. It would also imperil tens of thousands of businesses that depend on industrial water use, and raise the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Huge portions of the West areserved by the Colorado River, which starts high in the Rockies before flowing downstream through Lake Powell, Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, and ultimately into California.
Climate experts have long warned that climate change will make the West hotter and drier, and worry that what's happening now represents a long-term shift that could reshape how people live and work across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. Some water experts say Lake Powell could hit its lowest level ever later this summer.
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And the beach where the McLaughlins' kids were playing? That's at Lake Dillon, a key source of drinking water for millions of Colorado residents that today sits at less than 60% full. Under normal circumstances, melting snow would be refilling the reservoir. Instead, the water remains hundreds of feet from the shoreline, with docks stuck in the mud. Little water trickled in, even though it was 70 degrees.
Water restrictions and concerns in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming
∎ At Lake Powell, which straddles the Arizona-Utah line, workers are preparing to move the entire floating Bullfrog Marina across the shrinking lake to the Hall's Crossing area, where the water will stay deeper longer. Water managers are warning that Lake Powell's water levels this year could drop to its lowest recorded level since the lake began filling in the 1960s.
Lake Powell is filled by the Colorado River and uses its water to generate hydroelectricity for about 500,000 households across the Southwest. But if the Colorado Riverflows this year are as low as projected, the lake level could by this fall drop below what's known as "power pool," or the minimum level necessary to spin the turbines.
When it first opened, Lake Powell was big enough to warrant a 30-minute car ferry that shuttled vehicles between Hall's Crossing on the south and Bullfrog on the north, saving drivers two hours of travel time. The ferry no longer runs because the loading ramps are so far from the water's edge. Many of the lake's boat-launch ramps are hanging hundreds of feet above the water level, and workers are once again extending them to reach the new shoreline. Last year, about 3.7 million tourists visited Lake Powell.
∎ Salt Lake City officials, preparing for drought, have temporarily banned the opening of any large non-residential developments that consume significant amounts of water.
While the measure is aimed in part at halting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials from opening a 7,500-person detention facility, city leaders said it's simply irresponsible to permit large-scale water use at this time: "New large water users are particularly problematic due to Salt Lake City's worsening drought conditions and water conservation needs, which we are already taking action to address," Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in a statement. City and state officials are also considering ways to protect the long-shrinking Great Salt Lake.
At Mendenhall's orders, city facilities have been ordered to cut their water use by at least 10%, and residents and businesses have been asked to voluntarily conserve 10 million gallons.
∎ In Denver, residents havebeen told to hold off wateringtheir lawns until late May, even though temperatures have repeatedly been in the 80s across the city. The Denver Water Board on March 25 also restricted residential lawn watering to two days a week per house, down from three in normal years. Restaurants are only allowed to serve water to diners who specifically request it. And hotels cannot change sheets more often than four times a week, unless a guest requests it or the room turns over to a new customer.
Because Denver typically gets only about 15 inches of rain a year − Miami receives four times as much, in comparison − the city depends heavily on melting snow to fill reservoirs like Lake Dillon. Water board officials said they are adopting tough measures now to help avoid further problems next summer for their 1.5 million customers across the metro area.
"The conditions we are experiencing are unprecedented, and we need customers to save water to protect the supply we have right now," Nathan Elder, Denver Water's manager of water supply, said in a statement.
∎ In the northern Colorado city of Erie, officialswarned residents and businessesto halt any irrigation until early April, and they warned they could shut off water access to anyone caught wasting water on their lawns. Erie gets most of its water from melting snow that's piped across the Continental Divide, and that area saw unusually poor snow this winter.
"This is an extraordinary measure for an extremely precarious situation," city officials said in a March 20 announcement. "Demands are currently approaching 30% higher than usual at this time of year."
∎ In Wyoming, state officials have already told some water users to cut back to preserve supplies for the coming summer. And federal officials are expected to draw down one of the state's largest reservoirs, Flaming Gorge, to put water into Lake Powell during the hot summer months. State Engineer Brandon Gebhart warned some communities to prepare for not having adequate drinking water supplies in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Western drought threatens water supply, boosts wildfire risk
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