Colorado residents face earliest water restrictions ever — a harbinger of worse to come

As a result of a snow drought and a heat wave that have both set records, some Colorado residents face the earliest restrictions on their water use ever imposed.

Denver Water announced Wednesday that it is seeking a 20% cut in water use, asking people to turn off automatic watering systems until mid-May and restricting the watering of trees and shrubs to twice a week.

“The situation is quite serious,” said Todd Hartman, a spokesperson for the utility. “We’re in such a dire situation that we could be coming back to the public in two or three months and saying you’re limited to one day a week.”

It is the earliest in the year that Denver Water has ever issued a restriction, Hartman said.

Colorado’s snowpack peaked at extremely low levels on March 12 — nearly a month earlier than usual — then cratered during the recent heat wave that cooked nearly every state in the West.

“We already had the lowest snowpack we’ve seen since at least 1981, and now, with the heat wave conditions, we’ve already lost about 40% of the statewide snowpack” since the March 12 peak, said Peter Goble, Colorado’s assistant state climatologist. “Conditions are looking more like late April or early May.”

The water restrictions are a harbinger of what’s to come in many Western states as officials try to manage widespread drought concerns. Nearly every snow basin in the Mountain West had one of its warmest winters on record and is well behind normal when it comes to water supply, according to the U.S. drought monitor. The dwindling snowpack is likely to raise the risk of severe wildfires, hamper electricity generation at hydropower dams and force water restrictions for farmers.

Hartman said nearly every community east of the Rockies, along Colorado’s front range, is in much the same boat as Denver.

City Council members in Aurora are considering similar water restrictions; reservoirs there stand at about 58%, according to the city’s website. In the town of Erie, officials declared a water shortage emergency on March 20 after they observed a massive spike in consumption.

Gabi Rae, a spokesperson for the town, said Erie was perilously close to having taps run dry because so many residents had started watering their lawns early amid the unseasonable heat.

“We were a day away from running out of water. That’s why it was such an emergency,” she said.

Erie officials demanded that residents stop using irrigation systems altogether.

Goble said this month’s heat wave has set records in every corner of Colorado, sometimes by double digits.

“I can’t remember seeing a single heat wave that broke this many records, and seeing it across such a large portion of the country is certainly eye-popping,” he said, adding: “I’m located in Fort Collins, and we got up to 91 last Saturday. The previous record for March was 81, so we smashed that record. And it wasn’t just one day, either.”

Denver Water, which serves about 1.5 million residents in the city and its surrounding suburbs, gets about half of its water from the Upper Colorado River Basin and the South Platte River Basin. The latter’s snowpack was at about 42% of normal Tuesday, the utility reported. The Upper Colorado River Watershed was at 55%.

Systemwide, Denver Water’s reservoirs are about 80% full, which is only about 5 percentage points lower than in a typical year.

“That sounds pretty good,” Hartman said. “Except that what we’re not going to be able to rely on is that rush of water that will bring those reservoirs back up, because the snowpack is so low.”

In other words, the snowpack — a natural water reservoir — is mostly tapped already and won’t replenish reservoirs later this spring and into summer, when runoff usually peaks.

In Erie, city workers plan to aggressively police water use until sometime next week using smart meters that monitor residential usage. Rae said the city is also sending utility workers to patrol neighborhoods and look for sprinklers that are turned on.

“People have been kind of annoyed with how aggressive we were, and I don’t necessarily think they understand the ramifications if we weren’t,” Rae said. “It is an actual serious emergency situation. We were so close to reaching empty, there would literally be no water coming out of the taps — hospitals, schools, fire hydrants, your home would have no water.”

Although the limits on outdoor watering will be lifted soon, Rae expects more restrictions later this spring and summer.