OPINION — The Colorado River didn't fail us. We failed to pay attention, choosing comfort over correction when maturity was required.
For two decades, scientists have said the same thing: the West is hotter, the river is shrinking and the math doesn't work. Flows have averaged 12 to 13 million acre-feet in recent decades, nowhere near the numbers in a century-old compact written during an unusually wet period. We knew this. We kept building anyway.
Full reservoirs are a kind of sedative. When Lake Mead sat high through the 90s and early 2000s, it didn't just store water, it stored confidence. Subdivisions went up in Central Arizona. Alfalfa kept growing in the desert. The reservoir was visible, but the aquifer depletion, the shrinking snowpack, the warming baseline were not.
