Better-Than-Expected Monsoon Boosts NM's Elephant Butte Reservoir To . . . 4% Of Capacity
Much-hoped-for summer rains have put four times more water into a key reservoir in Southern New Mexico than federal officials had forecast earlier this year. Monsoons have dropped enough rain to fill Elephant Butte Reservoir to 4 percent of its capacity, which is still quite low but far better than the 1 percent predicted for the end of August.
The bad news is that far more precipitation will be needed to pull the state out of its severe water shortage — years more, in fact. While a few months of rain offers a welcome reprieve to a prolonged drought, it will take several strong snowpacks and robust monsoon seasons in a row to sufficiently replenish Elephant Butte and other record-low reservoirs, federal water managers say.
A weather analyst agreed. “It’s going to take a long time for that [water storage] to become anywhere near normal, if it ever does again,” said Brian Guyer, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Albuquerque. “We can hardly manage to get more than one above-normal snowfall in a decade, let alone have two in a row.”
As of this week, Elephant Butte had 102,000 acre feet of water. An acre foot is roughly 326,000 gallons, enough to cover a football field with a foot of water. Caballo Reservoir, about 27 miles farther south, was expected to end August with less than 15,000 acre feet. It would be ideal for the two reservoirs to reach a combined 400,000 acre feet, enabling New Mexico to store water again under its 70-year-old pact with Texas and Colorado, said Mary Carlson, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water resources and dams. Right now, New Mexico must funnel whatever Rio Grande water it doesn’t use for irrigation to Texas to meet the obligations under the agreement.
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