An amateurs view of the Southwest drought.

When we left Las Vegas back in 2011, Lake Meads water level was about 100 feet below full, and it is now 137.7 feet below full levels and only 39.3 percent full with no outlook for improvement any time soon. 

I hadn't been to Nevada for a while so I had to find photos of Lake Mead on google so I'm guessing this may be considered plagiarism. There is no date on the picture, but an assumption on my part believes it could be from 2013 or 2014. 

The reason for my interest in the southwest drought is because  my brother Joe, who was visiting, showed me some photos of Lake Shasta and Mount Shasta as he drove over the bridge on Hwy 5. During our college years, Donna and I spent many days relaxing on Lake Shasta, fishing, water-skiing and houseboating but never saw it in this condition. It's so sad to see the devastation from the lack of rain and snow in California.

Here is a photo I took in 2012 with the lake in the background nearly full at the time. We did a tour of the power plant inside the dam, without any inkling that just a few short years from then the lake would be in such a critical shortage of water.

While doing some "light" research on the drought (I am retired you know) I ran across this google photo of the California snow pack for January 2013 vs 2014... quite dramatic.

This is the marina at Folsom Lake near Sacramento, and it use to be a very popular spot with the water-skiing crowd. 

This is a photo my brother took of Shasta on July 6 2014.

This is a photo Donna and I took of Mount Shasta in April two years earlier, hardly recognizable? 

An all too common sight, trucks pulling houseboats out of the lake water because, really...who wants to spend $2500 a week floating in a mud hole!

 I am surprised that there hasn't been more of an attempt at replacing millions of acres of lawns with Xeriscape. Without trying to politicize the drought, we need food grown by our farmers more than grass lawns. 

It may not be too late to help with some strict conservation measures aided by some massive desalination plants for drinking water. Unfortunately the plants won't help the agriculture industry because of its enormous costs attributed to desalinating ocean water.

This spring I watched the Wenachee roar down the mountains, full of melting spring snow and as a former Southern Californian, I was amazed at the amount of water from just this small contributor into the mighty Columbia River system.

My brother who is from Southern Cal, jokingly said they'd love to have just one days flow of the Columbia River for the state of California. As best as I could figure out, the Columbia dumps 500,000 acre feet of fresh water into the Pacific every day...I  think you'd need nearly a solid month to help fill all the nearly empty reservoirs of California and none of those figures include the water from Lake Mead or Powell, which combined have a capacity of 50,000,000 acre feet  when full.

If you care to browse through the Department of Water Resources in California you might be shocked by the lack of rainfall, snowfall and low percentage of capacity within all of California's reservoirs. Without nitpicking my calculations, I figure a total capacity of 26,000,000 acre feet of water when full, but now holding much less than 50% overall.

When you look at how much fresh water is available on earth, you'll note that of all the fresh water available, 68% is either locked up in glaciers or the earths icecaps, 30% rests as underground water but only .03% (yes, .03) are found on surface lakes or rivers. 

Now if you add up the populations of California, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico we would be talking about 70 million citizens. I have no doubt whatsoever, that the U.S. Government or Supreme Court will one day, if this drought continues, grant eminent domain on the fresh waters running out to sea in the Northwest for the parched Southwest. 

Donna and I were able to move to the Northwest, but if Southern California's drought continues at its present pace I can't see a scenario where property values stay stable enough in the Southwest and thereby allowing folks to economically migrate to wetter areas of the United States.

Sorry this is one of my "doom and gloom" blogs, but it's all my brother Joe's fault for making me aware just how bad it was in the south. I saw on TV recently, one of the weather experts predicting that even with the possibility of an El Niño this coming winter, it won't provide enough relieve from the drought.