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