Water reaching a Colorado State University dorm has crossed the Continental Divide, passed through tunnels and treatment systems and entered a network built on a river that is shrinking with rules that assumed it wasn’t.
The science of the Colorado River’s decline is not new. It is, however, arriving faster than expected.
Since the early 2000s, flows in the Colorado River have dropped roughly 20% compared to 20th-century measurements. Average annual flows during the 20th century ran about 14.6 million acre-feet per year; since 2000, that number has fallen to roughly 12.4 million acre-feet…