100 years after compact, Colorado River nearing crisis point
In November 1922, seven land-owning white men brokered a deal to allocate water from the Colorado River, which winds through the West and ends in Mexico
DENVER (AP) — The intensifying crisis facing the Colorado River amounts to what is fundamentally a math problem.
The 40 million people who depend on the river to fill up a glass of water at the dinner table or wash their clothes or grow food across millions of acres use significantly more each year than actually flows through the banks of the Colorado.
In fact, first sliced up 100 years ago in a document known as the Colorado River Compact, the calculation of who gets what amount of that water may never have been balanced.
“The framers of the compact — and water leaders since then — have always either known or had access to the information that the allocations they were making were more than what the river could supply,” said Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
