Lake Powell

Unless we get some kind of 200% snowpack this year, it's going to take years to recover from this.

Are they going to bag Lake Powell and just have Lake Mead?

That is a possibility.

They're going to have to figure out something because the water's not there.

There was somebody who originally was one of the main designers of Lake Powell, I was reading.

It said back in the day, we don't need like, oh, this is crazy.

We just need the one.

So I got to be around people from Utah for the first time when I went to college.

And everybody seemed to talk about this place called Lake Powell.

Lake Powell is the greatest place You go down there, you go boating, you jump off cliffs.

People have houseboats down there.

And if you're not familiar with Lake Paliz, it's down there somewhere in the vicinity of the Arizona, Nevada, Las Vegas, somewhere over there.

And it's just got like rock on the shorelines.

There's no trees or anything like that.

Okay, so anyway, I kept hearing about how great Lake Powell is.

The lawsuit's like the root of last option that we wanna go, but this cut, that just came down is so egregious and so sloppy and so one-sided and listen i think we need to provide it and by the way we passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act which together invested about 12 billion dollars into water conservation in the west A lot of that funding was like wiped out under the Doge cuts under this administration.

They're starting to come back and realize that, darn, we lost a lot of critical time in these last few years, especially at a time when the water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell is at historic lows, threatening, literally threatening the health of the dams and threatening, a lot of hydroelectricity is produced from both the Glen Canyon Dam and the Hoover Dam, powering Phoenix area, Tucson, and powering Southern Nevada.

And so we're at a critical, critical point.

I wish that this administration would have, instead of cutting those investments, use them to provide types of incentives for the type of water reuse that we're seeing here in Southern Nevada all across the system.

The beautiful Red Rock area.

I mean, you've got Zion National Park, Bryce, and Lake Powell and, as we said, the North Rim, the Grand Canyon.

Is that like 45 minutes from you, the North Rim?

North Rim's about an hour.

So you have to cool it down, which means now all of a sudden you're consuming massive amounts of water.

And Arizona, we're talking, there are some people talking about destroying the Hoover Dam and getting rid of Lake Powell in order to provide enough water for Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and California going forward.

And that is insane.

And part of the reason that that conversation is happening is because those states are experiencing a massive influx of data centers that are using up a ton of water to cool their facilities.

People visiting Flaming Gorge Reservoir over the holiday may have noticed water levels much lower than usual.

The Bureau of Reclamation is sending large amounts of water downstream to help out struggling Lake Powell.

KSL Newsradio's Brianna Willis reports.

The Bureau will be sending around a million acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to the lake.