Who Drinks the River?
The Colorado's paper allocations exceed its water, and the shortfall has to land on someone. Set the river's flow, choose the allocation rule, and the model computes who gets what.
open the piece at colorado.exe.xyz →An annual mass balance of the Colorado mainstem: one storage node for Lake Mead and Lake Powell together, naturalized inflow at Lees Ferry, evaporation scaling with storage. Backtested against the 2000 to 2024 reservoir collapse.
The piece is built around a ledger of real public claims, quoted from social media in August 2026, each adjudicated against the model rather than argued in prose. The first finding is that "half the river goes to cattle feed" is true of the water humans take and a third of everything the basin consumes. Both numbers are real. Arguments happen when people quote one and hear the other.
Data named on the piece: Richter et al. 2024 (consumption accounting), the Reclamation natural-flow database 1906 to 2024 (supply), the Boulder Canyon Project Act and the 1944 Treaty (entitlements), and the post-2026 Record of Decision (framework). The full verification ledger ships with the source.
what it lets you do
Scrub one timeline from 1906 to about 2060. Left of today is the record. Right of today the same scrubber drives the model under your levers, so the future is something you set rather than read. Copy the link to any scenario and send it.
claims it answers
- “Every year we drain more than half of the Colorado River for cattle feed.”
- “The value of the dairy and beef industries fed by Colorado-irrigated crops is totally negligible. We could just buy their water rights and retire them.”
- “Once productive farmland is permanently dried up, getting that agricultural economy back is extraordinarily difficult.”
Real public claims, adjudicated on the piece itself, not here.
claims it should answer next
- “The entire Western US water crisis could be fixed by ending alfalfa farming in the desert.”Sukrit Ganesh (@SukritGanesh), X · 2026-08-22 · source
- “take the water that is currently stored in Lake Powell, send it downstream through the Grand Canyon, and instead store it in Lake Mead”Zanna Stutts, Glen Canyon Institute, as quoted by Newsweek (Joe Edwards) via KUTV; headline "Lake Powell Should be Drained to Save Lake Mead, Scientists Say" · 2026-07-07 · source
Cited here so the gap is visible. Not yet adjudicated on the piece.
what it stylizes or leaves out
The piece labels its own stylizations. The seniority rule is a party-level simplification of the priority system; real law operates on individual rights and treaty minutes. Direct human consumption is held at its 2000 to 2019 recorded average.
- place
- Colorado River basin · 36.1, -114.7
- span
- 1906 → 2060
- sources
- 4 named on the piece
- repo
- github.com/orbitalfoundation/colorado
- topics
- water, agriculture, law