Elephant Butte Reservoir - Largest In NM - Projected To Drop To 1% Of Capacity By August
From the base of Elephant Butte Dam, the scale of the reservoir’s decline is evident. The high-water mark — visible way up on the gray concrete wall — shows the last time the lake reached full capacity, in the late 1990s, when a surplus of water would periodically rush through the spillway into the Rio Grande below.
“We used to drive over the dam and then dive into the lake,” Billy Jack Miller said as he piloted his boat away from the dam and toward the lake’s namesake — an elephant-shaped butte. “If you jumped now, you’d die,” he said of the treacherous drop to the water below.
Miller, 67, is a fifth-generation New Mexican who has been coming to Elephant Butte Lake since he was a boy. He moved here permanently from Santa Fe in 1999 to start a fishing company, Rio Grande Guide Service, and live out his life on the water. “The lake used to be 44 miles long,” Miller said, expertly maneuvering the boat between the green and red buoys that guide boaters through shallow areas. “Now it’s six or seven, as the crow flies.”
Mary Carlson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau Of Reclamation, which manages Elephant Butte Lake and other reservoirs throughout the state, said it is now filled to just 7 percent or 8 percent of its capacity. By August, she said, the lake is projected to be at 1 percent. “It’s this drought,” Miller said. “It just keeps going.” In New Mexico and across the Southwest, a two-decade drought has led to low water flows in streams and rivers and dramatically shrinking reservoirs. The steadily dropping supply of surface water has put a strain on communities that tap into it for household and business use and farmers who rely on the release of stored water to irrigate their fields.
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https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/in-new-mexico-communities-dependent-on-aquatic-recreation-worsening-drought-could-be-disastrous/article_f139f6aa-d2f0-11eb-b4ae-731ade62d362.html
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