OCR Text |
Show Lake Powell reaches record high level The Bureau of Reclamation announced today that the elevation ele-vation of Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado Col-orado River in northern Arizona Ari-zona is at an all-time high of about 4589 feet above mean SQa level and contains 11 million mil-lion acre-feet of active storage. stor-age. The reservoir is expected to rise about 4 feet more and stay near this level during the remainder of the recreation season. With precipitation in May only 30 percent of normal, the April through July runoff forecast fore-cast for the Upper Colorado River Basin has been reduced to 85 percent of the long-time average. The runoff for this period Is now expected to be 7-0 million acre-feet compared with last year's April through July runoff of 8.2 million acre-feet acre-feet and a long-time average of 8.3 million acre-feet. Planned Plan-ned releases of water of about 8.8 million acre-feet for water year 1970 will cause the level of Lake Powell to be about 5 feet lower next fall and winter. Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam was at elevation 1151 feet above mean sea level on June 1 or about 10 feet higher than a year ago. The reservoir is now 70 feet below the top of the raised spillway gates at Hoover Dam. The lake has been near this level since early April and will be held at or near this level during the summer to protect the young-of-the-year bass. The Hoover Dam reservoir at present contains con-tains 16.6 million acre-feet of available storage or 61 percent per-cent of its capacity. |