Colorado River "Total System Crash" EXPLAINED: What The Headlines Aren't Telling You...

[00:00:00]Total system crash.

[00:00:02]What is that? Mainstream media has a new buzzword phrase for the current news cycle, the Colorado River system total system crash.

[00:00:09]What does that mean and when is coming?

[00:00:11]Well, we all know that this situation is coming to a head, right? So, that's kind of what they're trying to hint at here, but um just like YouTube, the mainstream media needs a hook to get you interested right off the bat, right? So, they're all using this total system crash, total system crash, but then when you go into the article, they don't really discuss much on like, well, what does that mean?

[00:00:31]When is it happening? They're just kind of, you know, throwing out estimates, okay? So, does this mean the lower basin states will lose their water supply?

[00:00:39]Does it mean the upper basin states will have to start taking the situation seriously and contribute to all cuts equally? Or does it just mean that everyone is going to feel the pain of lower water levels and ongoing drought no matter where they are situated on the river? All right?

[00:00:54]So, let me break this down cuz I've read about 10 or 15 of these articles all with the same headlines, okay?

[00:01:00]They will immediately say, well, does it mean everyone's going to lose water? No, that's not what the total system crash means. They're basically trying to say this situation here is coming to a head and there's going to be drastic changes on the horizon, okay? And not only on the horizon, we're basically there, right? 1 October is the end of the water year and that's when the USBR, the federal government, current administration is going to come in and they're going to roll out their plan, right? So, we're just waiting for that plan to come out as we watch all these water levels drop and them trying to save Powell and Flaming Gorge getting drained. A among all this stuff happening, the big thing we're waiting for is that 1 October date because that's when the real plan is going to start, right?

[00:01:42]Everything that's going on you're seeing here is just kind of emergency measures to get us to that date so everyone can find out what's going to happen, right?

[00:01:49]So, no, it doesn't mean that everyone's going to lose their water. It doesn't mean Las Vegas is running out of water.

[00:01:54]I I did a video on that if you haven't seen it yet, it doesn't mean any of that. In fact, if you read these articles, what they specifically say is that the total system crash might look different for everyone along the river.

[00:02:07]Why is that? Because like we've covered in Las Vegas here, we have that third intake, right? And not only that, the SNWA is constantly telling people that we have about 10 years of water stored in underground aquifers. All right? So, let's say that the water stops coming down for Las Vegas. Apparently, according to the SNWA, we still have a plan for 10 years of water supply, okay? So, that could look very different though downstream to say, let's say an agricultural user in the Imperial Valley. As many of you watch this channel know, those are the biggest water users on the entire Colorado River is that Imperial Irrigation District. Well, guess what?

[00:02:50]They don't really have any backup plans for the water supply, okay? They haven't been storing water. They've been really storing water with paper water credits, right? Their water rights are in paper.

[00:03:00]So, they've always been accustomed to having those rights and being able to flex them. So, they've never made a plan like Las Vegas has to store water. So, the total system crash for agricultural users down there may look like them losing water, while up here to us, it may just look like we're going to have to turn to other sources that we've stored up over the years. You see what I mean? So, when you start seeing this buzzword thrown around in all these news stories, total system crash, total system crash, just know that this system crash is going to look different for everyone along the river, okay? It's not like you would think when you read the headline where we're going to come out here and there's absolutely no more water and Las Vegas runs out of water and Phoenix runs out of water and everyone top to bottom has no more water. That's not what it means. They're just putting that headline there to get you to click, just like the YouTube videos, okay? So, the total system crash is going to look different for everyone. And unfortunately, like I found out from reading these news stories, there's no way we're going to know what that system crash actually looks like until it happens, right? And so, that's kind of what we're just doing out here is biding our time.

[00:04:08]You know, no one really wants to seem to budge. No one, especially the upper basin, I hate to harp on this, but the upper basin hasn't been making any cuts like the lower basin has. They haven't really been taking the situation seriously because they kind of look at us down here as we're the water wasters, and that they don't have to do anything differently.

[00:04:26]So, that total system crash might look a lot more dire to them because they might have to undergo rapid changes, like a bunch of cuts and conservation that they haven't been doing for decades, right?

[00:04:37]Well, down here in the lower basin, we've already been doing all those things, like I covered with the Las Vegas water patrol. We already have watering restrictions and restricted days of watering, and um excess usage charge, and all that stuff. So, people are already on the ball with that. You see what I mean? So, if they roll something like that out in the upper basin, where they're not accustomed to it, to them, it could look like crazy changes happening very fast. So, total system crash, that's what it means. And uh like I was just harping on, keep in mind that up in the upper basin, on the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, right? They've been diverting water eastward through the Big Thompson Project since the 1950s. One of our um viewers commented on this a couple live streams ago. For those of you who don't know, the Continental Divide is up in the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado River traditionally flows west down the slope of the mountain, right? And makes its way all the way down here through Lake Mead, all the way down to um Mexico, through Mexico, right? Back to the Gulf.

[00:05:38]But, what they did in the '50s, they created this Big Thompson Diversion, which takes water just from the western edge of the slope, and they cut and diverted it east of the slope. So, they diverted the river against its natural flow down the eastern side of the Rockies. And well, why did they do that?

[00:05:55]For much the same reason we built all the infrastructure down here, because thirsty cities like Denver and Aurora, all those growing suburbs, they need more water for their growth, all right?

[00:06:04]And so, people in the upper basin they really are on the train of blaming people down here, but they haven't really been looking around and seeing that there are some things that they've been doing, too, which maybe aren't all on the up and up. So, it might be the upper basin that is in for the biggest rude awakening when these mandatory cuts come down the pipeline. Go check Look up that Big Thompson Project. If you don't know about it, it's very interesting.

[00:06:28]And looking back, maybe that wasn't a good idea now, cuz it is contributing to some of the water loss down here.

[00:06:34]Although, it's nowhere near as um the irrigation users in Southern California are using. Still, every little bit counts, right? And that's why we have such strict conservation measures here in Las Vegas. Even though we only get 3% of the river water, and we don't use our full allotment, even, right? So, we get 3%, we don't even use all that, and we are under some of the most strict conservation measures in the entire country, if not the strictest at this point, [music] along with having a water reclamation loop, okay? So, every little drop counts, right? So, if [music] you enjoyed this clip, check out the full live stream in our Adventure Club section, and let us know down in [music] the comments which stories we should cover next.