Water & Drought
Western Water Crisis
39 reservoirs. 11 states. 73 million people facing critical water supply by September.
Press "Simulate Summer" to watch what happens to western reservoirs between now and September. The circles shrink and turn red as storage drops. Without snowmelt to refill them,and Washington, Oregon, and Idaho have zero snowpack with Montana nearly gone,there is no recovery coming.
Drought destroys like fire,just slower. When reservoirs empty and allocations get cut, crops fail, ranchers sell herds, rural economies collapse, and ecosystems that took decades to establish die in a single summer. The 2021 Klamath Basin shutdown,zero irrigation for 1,200 farms,cost $344M in a single season. Drought does not make headlines the way fire does, but it makes ghost towns.
April 1 snowpack determines summer water supply. In snowmelt-dominated western basins, April 1 SWE explains 50–80% of April–July runoff (Li et al. 2017). With corridor SWE at record lows and Oregon at zero, reservoirs face a supply gap that irrigation demand alone cannot bridge.
Reservoir storage: USBR Hydromet, USACE, CDEC, state agencies,updated May 2026. Water use: USGS Circular 1441 (2015). Summer forecast: historical drawdown × SWE-proportional inflow (Li et al. 2017). 39 reservoirs across 11 states. 1,830 SNOTEL stations.