re: How concerned are you about the water levels in Lake Mead?

Cities aren’t the problem. Inefficient and overuse of water for irrigation purposes is the problem. The ratio for irrigation to human consumption use is something like 10:1

Edit: fell for the troll

Meh, California has 840 miles of coastline with the largest body of water on the planet.

Let those dumbasses figure it out.

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People really have no idea as to how much water we use daily.

Per my basic calculations, the state of California uses roughly 5 BILLION gallons of water daily.

And that’s a real rough estimate based off the idea that each CA resident uses 125 gallons daily on average.

That volume is obscene and not even remotely possible.

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It’s actually even more than that.. a lot more, since California uses about 4x more water for agriculture than municipal water.

Doing the math based on actual usage of the Colorado River downstream of Lake Mead - demand is roughly 9.6 million acre-feet per year, or about 26,000 acre-feet per day. That’s roughly 8.5 billion gallons per day of water usage from Lake Mead.

Everyone says “we transport a shitload of oil.” The volume is different by orders of magnitudes. 8.5B gallons per day = 204 million barrels per day. The entire world produces about 80 million barrels of crude oil per day.

So you would need to build pipelines capable of supporting the equivalent of >2.5x the entire world’s crude oil supply just to replace the Colorado River water usage of Southern California and Arizona (the volume above doesn’t include Nevada or any of the upriver states that also use the Colorado River as their water source).

Even if you just wanted to replace the shortfall of water in the Colorado River (e.g. the Lake Mead inflows minus outflows, which is effectively the amount required to sustain the lake at its current level) you would need over a billion gallons (>25 million barrels) of water per day. That’s equivalent to >2x our entire country’s oil production that would have to be transported by pipeline to Lake Mead.

People keep saying this is scary, but I told my kids about it and they did not even have one nightmare.

I hate to say it, but they've paid for our unending stream of natural disasters. You've got to admit that the federal government has sent a lot of money to Louisiana the past 20 years.

I'm not concerned. I am interested. I do wonder when they will get enough rain and runoff to fill it back up.

I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago. 22 years of water level dropping and now seems it’s falling faster each day. If something doesn’t change in the next two years, water will start being rationed in the area. Hope those guys get lots of rain!!! Sad to see

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I don’t know, but I’m at Lake Travis this weekend and it looks very very low but I’ve never been here before.

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It's safe to say much of Texas is in a pretty severe drought.