The US Interior Department is preparing to impose mandatory cuts to the amount of water seven Western states draw from the Colorado River to avoid a "doomsday scenario" in which 25M people in Southwestern cities are unable to get water from the system.
Plunging water levels at the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead—the nation's largest—are approaching the point where the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams will have to be shut down, turning the nation's largest dams into obstacles to the delivery of water in the Southwest.
The federal government has asked the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River as a primary source of water to voluntarily cut usage by 2 to 4 million acre-feet—up to a third of the river's annual average flow—but the affected states have missed an August deadline to reach a consensus on where the cuts will be made.
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