The Sunday Story: Parched

Up First from NPR

NPR

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

The Colorado River has more dams on it than any other river in the United States. They were built to harness water high in the mountains and across the arid desert so people could build cities, industries and farms. But the visionaries of the past didn't account for the kind of population growth the southwest has experienced, and they didn't make a plan for what to do if there wasn't enough water to go around. Now, as the region suffers through a second decade of a mega drought, residents are scrambling to find solutions that will preserve their way of life. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, we head to Las Vegas, where water conservation has a new starring role. This episode comes from a new podcast from Colorado Public Radio and reporter Michael Elizabeth Sakas. It's called Parched.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Colorado River is one of the great rivers of the American West.
0:07.0	Colorado means reddish color in Spanish, so it's an appropriate name since the river
0:13.1	itself has all these minerals that give it a reddish hue.
0:16.8	But a better name for it now might be the golden river.
0:19.9	The southwest is in the second decade of a mega drought, and as water becomes more and
0:24.7	more scarce, the Colorado River and its tributaries have become the region's most precious
0:29.4	commodity.
0:30.4	I'm Rachel Martin with the Sunday story from up first.
0:33.8	It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Colorado River to the American Southwest.
0:38.6	It's critical for agriculture and for sustaining life for the tens of millions of people who
0:44.0	live in the region.
0:47.4	Michael Elizabeth Sackas is a water reporter for Colorado Public Radio, and she has spent
0:52.0	the past year traveling along the river, talking to people who rely on it.
0:57.0	And often, these people have ideas, sometimes really big ideas about how to save it.
1:02.2	She's put it all in a new podcast called parched, and she joins me now.
1:06.3	Hey Michael, hi Rachel, thank you so much for having me on.
1:09.6	Oh, I'm really happy to talk about this issue.
1:12.4	I'm from the American West and from Idaho, I understand water as a critical, critical issue
1:16.9	out there with huge ramifications.
1:19.8	So let's set the scene.
1:21.3	When we hear that things are bad in the Colorado River basin, what are we talking about exactly?
1:26.7	What does bad look like?
	...

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