Monsoon flows have prevented some of the water shortages officials were planning for this year, but they won’t be enough to curb the declining reservoirs in the Colorado River basin or significantly reduce New Mexico’s water debt to Texas in the Rio Grande basin. Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, the director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, presented the water conditions to the ISC on Friday. “It’s been very nice to get some of the rains that have been occurring in the past few weeks,” he said. “And the northwest part of New Mexico has been a beneficiary of a good number of those flows. It has propped up the available water for a number of people who otherwise would have been out.”
But even with that additional precipitation, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is projecting that Navajo Reservoir, which is located on the San Juan River and is part of the Colorado River’s watershed, could dip below critical levels next year.