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Lake Powell at 13 Percent Is Still Being Held Up by Flaming Gorge Releases

Saturday brought no Bureau of Reclamation amendment. Lake Powell still sits near 13 percent of capacity. Flaming Gorge is still releasing roughly 1,100 cubic feet per second on a daily average to keep Glen Canyon Dam above minimum power pool. [1]

The paper's Friday feature on Powell's 13 percent forecast turning drought into dam operations argued that the basin's drought had become a valve setting rather than a weather noun. That argument now holds across the weekend. The federal status page still shows the supplemental release window running through April 2027, with a planned delivery of 660,000 to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge to support Powell. [1]

The Colorado Sun's reporting on the April-through-July runoff into Lake Powell still puts this year's projected inflow below the 2002 record low. [2] No Saturday revision has narrowed or widened that forecast. The reservoir's historical-elevation table remains the surface on which any new low would appear; the gap above minimum power pool is the number that matters, and it has not changed overnight. [3]

The point of a standing wire on this story is to refuse to let the schedule become invisible. The Colorado Basin is being run on borrowed water from an upstream reservoir. That is not a one-day decision. It is a 2026-into-2027 operating regime. The day it stops being true will be the day the Bureau publishes a different release number.

-- DARA OSEI, London

Sources & X Posts

News Sources
[1] https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/fgd.html
[2] https://coloradosun.com/2026/05/09/lake-powell-forecast-water-flows-record-low/
[3] https://www.usbr.gov/rsvrWater/table/HistoricTable.html?datatype=Daily+Data&siteID=919&siteName=LAKE+POWELL
X Posts
[4] Flaming Gorge release stable at 1,100 cfs daily average. No change to the supplemental release window supporting Lake Powell. https://x.com/USBR/status/2055636474264504966

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