Lake Mead. The white line marks where the water level used to be,

Lake Mead. The white line marks where the water level used to be,

We all knew it could happen. With no sign of the drought ending, and with Lake Mead at barely one-quarter of its capacity, more water cuts were ordered last week by the Bureau of Reclamation. These cuts will become effective Jan. 1, 2023. Under the Tier 2a cuts, Arizona will see its total water deliveries cut by 21 percent in the last two years.

Why the cuts? You only have to look at the growing “bathtub ring” on Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam to understand. The water just isn’t available. The lake is so low, they’re seeing rock formations no one had seen since the early 1930s, when the dam was built.

They’ve even made some discoveries no one expected. You’ve all heard about the body found in a barrel that was once under plenty of water in Lake Mead. When it was exposed, it set off a guessing game as to who it was. Authorities said it was a man, and his clothes looked like the late 1970s or early ‘80s. It looks like an organized crime killing, so maybe the mob’s unofficial policy that no one dies in Vegas wasn’t entirely true.

The problem here is two-fold. First, the politicians allocated Colorado River water during a year that was abnormally wet. Thus, even in “normal” years, there’s not enough water to meet all the allocations.

Second, we human beings have built major metropolitan areas and agricultural developments in a desert that are all supplied with water from this one source, the Colorado River. Looking back on it, that doesn’t seem very smart.

All that, of course, doesn’t help things now. With all that being true, the question is, what do we do about the water shortage now?

We’ve seen a lot of rain during our monsoon season, and I hope some of that went into Lake Mead. What they really need is heavy snowpack in the mountains that will melt and run into the river. Even if the drought were to end tomorrow, Reclamation officials said it will take four to five years for the river to be back to where it was.

It’s really too early to say for sure what will happen. Officials at various levels will have until Jan. 1 to decide what to do. Clearly, cuts will have to be made. The question is, who will get cut, and by how much? How can we make sure the cuts are fair and equitable? How do we make these cuts with as little damage as possible to communities and the economy?

These are not easy questions to answer. Officials at all levels need to start working on this now, so they’re not panic-stricken at the last minute. That’s one of the ways bad policies emerge.

You can do your part in all this. You can go online for advice and tips on how to cut water use by you and your family. Homeowners can install low-use irrigation systems of desert landscaping. Many farmers use low-use irrigation systems, and many are looking at planting low-water crops. It shouldn’t be just up to the officials to work on water cuts. There are things we can all do.

Perhaps we all need to adopt the mindset that we live in a desert and act accordingly. It’s called a desert for a reason:  there’s little water here. If we accept lower water usage as the new normal, we may be better off in the long run.

We live in a desert. Maybe, instead of trying to get more water here, we should start acting like water is a scarce commodity. Maybe then we’ll be better prepared for the shortages and they won’t hurt so much.

As it stands now, we’ve got work to do between now and Jan. 1.

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