The system of tunnels and dams at the New Mexico state line diverts water into the Rio Grande Basin. Theyre going to make big bucks off the water, and whos going to suffer? she said. Roughly 180,000 people, most of them Mexican-American, live here in towns that include El Centro, Calexico, and Brawley. California receives the most Colorado River water at 4.4 million acre-feet. "Instead of eight cuttings of alfalfa, we might turn off the water in the summer and dry up the field, and let it come back in the fall," Benson says. In the Colorado River Basin as a whole, which services about 40 million people in seven states and is overtaxed to the point that it rarely ever reaches the ocean anymore, that number is 55%. All rights reserved. The Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California. Beginning Monday . His great-grandfather came to the valley from Sweden in the 1920s. We recognize that over the past twenty-plus years there is simply far less water flowing into the Colorado River system than the amount that leaves it, and that we have effectively run out of storage to deplete, the states wrote. Farmers also could reduce the amount of land planted in crops, especially alfalfa and grasses, which get baled into hay to feed cattle or horses. The Colorado River is tapped out. "We have a situation where some of the water rights holders in California are saying, 'We're not willing to give up more water, and we think we have legal rights and we're willing to go to court if we have to'," said David Hayes, a lecturer at Stanford University Law School. Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, at the river in Glenwood Springs, Colo. Marc Catlin, a Colorado state representative, noted the financial incentives for farmers. In the last 10 years, the price of water there has gone up more than eightfold. One, moving very rapidly, is climate change. (Anthony Jackson/The Albuquerque Journal via AP) The Associated Press. Who are the top five consumers of Colorado river? - Answers Today, the river provides water to 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland not just in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California but also to 29 Native American tribes and the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California. This scene is unlikely to last, though. That would be a disaster. The amount of water being used far exceeds whats actually available. But here there was nothing to see: just an empty field of ankle-high weeds and crimson splotches of peat. Lake Mead to rise one foot by Sunday after federal 'high flow' water Half of those acres lie within the Imperial Irrigation District.
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