The news about the Colorado River just keeps getting worse. We’ve know for years that flows have been declining. Now snowpack in the Rocky Mountains has gotten so low it appears that the Colorado River’s source is drying up.

This is really bad news for Southern California, both for urban water users and for farmers. About one fourth of the water used by urban households in Southern California comes from the Colorado River, and the River supplies pretty much all of the water used for farming in the Imperial Valley.

The outlook is especially bad for the City of LA. Much of our relatively small groundwater resources have become unusable due to industrial contamination. As for the LA Aqueduct, deliveries have been declining over the last few decades to reduce environmental damage in the Eastern Sierras, where the aqueduct originates. And even deliveries from the State Water Project have become less reliable.

There are seven states that rely on water from the Colorado River, and they’re divided into two groups:

Upper Basin States: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico

Lower Basin States: California, Nevada, Arizona

These two groups have been arguing for years over how to reduce their consumption, and have not yet reached an agreement. It looks increasingly likely that the Federal government will intervene, imposing restrictions in order to maintain water levels at Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. If the levels continue to fall, it could mean the dams will no longer be able to generate hydropower.

As all of LA’s water resources continue to decline, we can expect to pay higher prices for water, even as mandatory restrictions reduce our water use. There’s no easy fix. Much of the LA area’s growth was made possible by importing water from hundreds of miles away. Growth advocates did not foresee a future where snowpacks in the Sierras and the Rockies would decline substantially over decades. This is a structural problem that we currently have no solution for.

This story in the LA Times has more details on the impacts of a shrinking Colorado River.

The Colorado River, a Lifeline for Seven States, Is Drying Up at Its Source