By Andrew Hay
July 31 (Reuters) – The U.S. government announced on Friday proposed guidelines for sharing the drought-stricken Colorado River, which provides water to one in 10 Americans, irrigates land producing 15% of U.S. food output and generates power for 6 million people in seven states.
Those seven states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada, known as the basin states — were unable to agree on how to share the waters after over three years of talks to replace a plan that expires this year.
So the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation intervened with a 10-year proposal through 2036 designed to provide flexibility to operate the river’s two largest energy-producing reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — based on the river’s changing conditions, according to a final environmental impact statement released by the agency.
“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement.
The plan sets limits on how the river would be operated, and calls for annual releases from Lake Powell of between 5 million and 12 million acre-feet, compared with previous average annual releases of around 7.5 million acre-feet.
The framework also envisages water shortages of up to 3 million acre-feet per year in the three Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. The Lower Basin states had presented a short-term proposal on May 1 for annual water cuts of 1.6 million acre-feet per year through 2028.
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; editing by Donna Bryson, Aurora Ellis, Rod Nickel)
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