What’s more, thanks to the giant dam anchored at the head of the canyon, plus eighteen other dams up and down the rest of the river, every cubic foot of the Colorado’s flow was metered and rationed by a vast network of infrastructure for water storage, hydropower, and flood control upon which the entire Southwest depended. No other river in America was more rigorously controlled or more stringently regulated—and none had been exploited so ruthlessly that, according to one set of calculations, every drop of its water was used and reused up to seventeen times before the Colorado dried up and
...more
