Denver Water customers have yet to embrace a strict water diet this year, cutting water use just 5% this month as the outdoor watering season begins.
The utility, which serves 1.5 million customers, has asked residents and businesses to slash water use by 20% this summer to combat extreme drought.
At the same time, reservoirs, unable to refill after melting snows evaporated early due to a surprising March heatwave, are dropping. The utility said its storage system is just 79% full, down from the 89% mark normally seen at this time of year.
Denver Water officials said they’re not disappointed with their customers, in part because they’re asking homeowners and businesses to adopt habits they haven’t had to use in years.
“We didn’t expect them to be saving 20% right away,” said Greg Fisher, Denver’s manager of water supply planning. “It’s been 13 years since we were under mandatory drought restrictions. It takes a few months to get up and running on this.”
Aurora homeowners and businesses have cut use 6.5%, Aurora Water spokesperson Shonnie Cline said. And the city’s reservoirs are similarly low, standing at just 56% full. This time last year they were 66% full.
At issue is Colorado’s drought emergency. Mountain snows, which provide the majority of the state’s water supplies, hit critical lows this year and then melted off in a March heat wave that also set records, with temperatures soaring into the 80-degree to 90-degree range.
In response, cities across the state imposed strict watering restrictions, pleading with customers to sharply limit water use so that water stored in reservoirs can be preserved as long as possible.
That reservoir levels are dropping in May is unprecedented, Fisher said. “Levels usually would be rising now,” he said. “But ours are dropping.”
Rains this month have helped. The most recent forecasts indicate that summer monsoons may be wetter than normal and a developing El Niño weather pattern later this year could deliver more liquid relief, according to Russ Schumacher, director of Colorado State University’s Colorado Climate Center.
Rains won’t necessarily help refill reservoirs, but they will help reduce the summer demand for water, meaning less needs to be released from the giant storage pools.
Utilities hope their customers will use the rains that may come as a good reason to turn off their sprinklers.
“We need to use Mother Nature as much as we can,” Fisher said. “You can literally just take a week off.”
Colorado Springs is one of the few cities that hasn’t imposed special water restrictions because its reservoirs, at the start of the watering season, were fairly full. Its normal watering schedule limits sprinkler use to three days a week, according to Colorado Springs Utilities spokesperson Jennifer Johnson. The utility actually saw water use rise slightly in May.
On Colorado’s Western Slope, the situation is also dire. This month the Colorado River District and the Colorado Water Conservation Board agreed to use water from special conservation pools in Ruedi and Wolford Mountain reservoirs to help small towns that are in danger of running out of water, and to provide some help to Western Slope farmers and the fish trying to survive in streams that are drying out.
Roughly half of the water that serves Denver and other Front Range communities comes from the Western Slope and the Colorado River. It is transferred through tunnels to the Front Range. Reductions in water use by Denver and other cities will take some of the stress off the Colorado River.
Lindsay DeFrates, deputy communications director for the Colorado River District, said the district is asking Western Slope towns to water just one day a week.
The district manages the Colorado River and represents 15 Western Slope counties. It has no authority to impose restrictions on mountain communities, but it is still pushing hard for a broad-based commitment to turn off the sprinklers.
“And obviously,” DeFrates said, “we’re hoping Front Range cities will do the same.”
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