OPINION: Chaos on the Colorado River

This op-ed by Gary Wockner appeared on Colorado Newsline on May 8, 2026.

The chaos on the Colorado River has reached a fevered pitch.

In a March 30, USA Today news story, the river’s most respected climate scientist, Brad Udall, described the extreme drought and its implications on the Southwest and the river as “dire” and “horrific.”

That climate-driven warmth and dryness has helped send the nation’s two massive downstream Colorado River reservoirs, Mead and Powell, to their lowest points in history. Even normally conservative reports from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are warning that Powell Reservoir could hit so-called “power pool” as soon as August, at which point Glen Canyon Dam could no longer produce hydropower and release enough water to legally satisfy downstream states. A few weeks ago, Reclamation ordered the gates open at Flaming Gorge Dam in Wyoming to send more water downstream in an attempt to save Glen Canyon Dam, a move that everyone considers a last-ditch option.

Amidst that dire and horrific chaos, you’d think that all the states — including Colorado — and their water agencies would stop trying to build new dams, reservoirs and pipelines to further deplete the Colorado River, right?

Wrong.

My organization, Save The Colorado, specializes in identifying, and trying to stop, proposed new dams and depletions. We also closely monitor the progress of every proposed dam/depletion project in the Colorado River basin.

At present, 15 new projects are proposed in the state of Colorado, eight in Utah, four in New Mexico, and three in Wyoming. Some of these projects are being built, others just starting permitting, and yet others are still on the drawing board. See them all listed here on our website.

In total, these projects would divert hundreds of thousands of acre feet of new water out of the Colorado River system. Further, all of these project are in the Upper Basin, above Powell Reservoir and Glen Canyon Dam, and so all would further drain the reservoirs and stress the political chaos even more.

At present, the seven Southwest states and the Bureau of Reclamation are at a standstill in their negotiations for how to fix the current problems on the river, let alone how to deal with even more water being drained out. Not a week goes by where my Colorado River Google alert doesn’t flash another threat of a lawsuit by one of the states as the political chaos intensifies.

Lots of ideas are being bandied around in the media and in the closed-door meetings of the stakeholders, but one idea we don’t hear about anymore is “no new depletions.”

To his credit, Brad Udall has been the only scientists to speak out about this. In a July 25 news report in the Arizona Republic, Udall said, “It’s idiotic to build any reservoirs to increase use, based on what we know about flows.”

Udall’s statement was over eight months ago, but nothing has changed.

Case in point is the climate disaster right here in Boulder County, Colorado, where I live, the Gross Dam Expansion Project, which would divert a new 10,285 acre feet of water (3.35 billion gallons), every single year, directly out of the Colorado River at the tippy-top of the Continental Divide, thereby depleting everything downstream of it.

The Gross Dam project, being built by Denver Water, is such a bad idea that a federal district court judge ruled solidly against it, supporting my organization’s lawsuit, and put a permanent injunction against filling it with new Colorado River water. In her ruling, the judge cited how the new depletion would further drain the river and how climate change was intensifying and reducing river flows. Similarly, as the court case proceeds on appeal, a group of law professors, led by Mark Squillace here at the University of Colorado Boulder, put in an amicus brief supporting the judge’s opinion.

But, the dam builders build on, and plan for even more depletions across the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The state of Colorado, and many of the Front Range cities, are leading that charge to further drain the River and accelerate the chaos.

I have no idea if a deal will actually be struck to end the chaos on the Colorado River, or if it will end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court very soon. But, whatever happens and whoever rules, “no new depletions” needs to be front and center as one of the solutions to the problem.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging, right?

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.