By Kennedy Maize
El Niño is doing for the man-made, federally owned, drought-stricken Colorado River System what Uncle Sam can’t.
Thanks to torrential rain in the four-corners region of the Southwest, the water level of Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam in Coconino County, Ariz., by Nov. 4 had risen 17 feet in the prior 30 days, according to official measurements. The water level rose another 17 inches in the two days after the Nov. 4 measurement.
Had the rain not fallen, the two giant dams on the river system, often called “the lifeblood of the west,” faced the possibility of being unable to continue generating electricity and supplying large amounts of irrigation water to some 22,000 square kilometers of agricultural land.
The rainfall filled local rivers, particularly the San Juan, which flows 383 miles through the deserts of northern New Mexico and southeastern Utah to join the Colorado River at Glen Canyon.
The heavy rainfall left the lake’s water elevation at 3,536 feet, some 46 feet above “minimum power pool,” the level needed to keep the dam’s hydroelectric turbines spinning and generating power. The 60-year-old dam’s 8 Francis turbines can generate 1,320-MW of electric power. Annual generation averages around 4,700 GWh.
The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the massive river system affecting some 40 million people and the seven-state region that comprises the footprint, spent more than a year spinning wheels over a new, 20-year policy to govern the system and allocate its water. The negotiations pitted the four up-river supplying states – Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah – against the three major down-river consuming states – Nevada, Arizona, and California, in what amounted to a political stalemate.
During that time, the Trump administration’s Interior Department was largely feckless, continually warning the waring states that it would impose a new river compact, with ever retreating deadline. To this day, two years into Trump’s second term, BuRec does not have a Senate-confirmed commissioner to run the agency. The administration has failed to even nominate a commissioner since it nominated an Arizona water expert in June 2025 and withdrew the nomination in September 2025 when the upper basin states objected.
In August, Interior ordered a plan that essentially kicks the political dispute down the road until after the current administration departs, while protecting hydropower generation while impoverishing irrigation and threatening drinking water supply. The plan, which is essentially a pair of two-year orders with a future 10-year undefined program after that, cuts water allocation to the consuming states by 20%. All prior plans under the 1922 Colorado River Compact had been for 20 years.
Nevada promptly sued in federal court. The state and its water agencies told a district court that Interior’s imposed plan would devastate the Silver State with water supply reductions, while leaving the Upper Basin states untouched. The impact on Nevada would be particularly draconian for the state’s principal city, Las Vegas.
Enter El Niño, formally the “El Niño-Southern Oscillation” (ENSO), which the National Weather Service defines as “a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. On periods ranging from about three to seven years, the surface waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean warm or cool by anywhere from 1°C to 3°C, compared to normal.” 
This year’s El Niño is particularly strong, earning the title of “super El Niño,” although that’s not a technical term, but journalistic hype. It is pouring rainfall across the Southwest, not only pouring water into the Colorado River, causing devastating flooding of smaller rivers in the area.
There’s a chance that El Niño could hang around into the winter, bringing heavy snows to the Colorado River drainage. That would be a welcome further contributor rescuing the river system.
There’s a fine irony here, as some meteorologists note a connection between El Niño and climate change, which Trump insist is a “hoax.” It’s not that a warming world is causing El Niño, but that it may contribute to a more muscular common phenomenon.
According to the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, “The relationship between climate change and stronger El Niño is a topic of ongoing scientific research. While there is no definitive agreement in the scientific community, recent studies suggest that global heating may be leading to stronger El Niño events.
“One recent study found that current sea surface temperature extremes driven by El Niño have intensified by around 10% compared to pre-1960 levels. This builds on previous studies which predicted that the frequency of extreme El Niño events could double over the next century due to faster surface warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean brought on by global temperature rises.”
Then there is El Niño’s little sister, La Niña, “A cooling of the ocean surface, or below-average sea surface temperatures (SST), in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean….In general, the cooler the ocean temperature anomalies, the stronger the La Niña (and vice-versa).”
The Quad Report, covering energy policy and politics