Lake Mead reaches another record low as water apocalypse nears for Las Vegas, a city living in denial
by: Daniel Barker
NaturalNews.com
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
The severe droughts affecting the western United States are approaching apocalyptic proportions as the water level of Lake Mead – America’s largest capacity reservoir – has reached the lowest point in its history.
Lake Mead, which was formed when the Hoover Dam was built, supplies water to around 40 million people and is also a crucial agricultural resource in the region. Humans, livestock and crops in Arizona, California, Nevada and even northern Mexico depend on water from Lake Mead (and the Colorado River which feeds it) for power, drinking water and irrigation.
Major metropolitan areas including Las Vegas and Phoenix also rely heavily on Lake Mead water.
The water levels have just dropped (as of this writing on April 30, 2015) below 1,080 feet – that’s lower than last year’s record low level of 1080.19 feet.
What makes this even scarier is the fact that last year’s record low occurred in August – this year the record has been broken before the end of April and predictions are that the levels will continue to drop another seven feet by the end of June.
Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado River, which is in the midst of a relentless “super-drought” that has lasted 14 years so far, and which is expected to worsen over the coming years.
The Colorado River carries water from melted snow that flows into it from the “upper basin states” which include Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Lake Mead gets 96 percent of its water from this snow melt, which dropped below 47 percent of normal in 2013.
This decrease in snowpack runoff has in turn caused Lake Mead and other reservoirs along the Colorado River to drop to levels as low as 40 percent of capacity since the drought began.
Levels nearing “critical point”
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