It’s even worse than that. They knew the Colorado river was at a historic high when they allocated it in the west, and they intentionally overbooked it by 20%. The reasons for that last part are, I think, unclear now.
I think motivated reasoning is a lot of it. People lobbying those making the decisions, cronyism, vested interests, conflicts of interest, etc. Crucial resource and environmental decisions like that should be made by rational technocrats, not whatever high school football coach got elected county supervisor that year. But here we are.
Aaaaand it looks like the rain is done, locally. Probably that’s it for the rest of the season, too. We’ve only hit about half our “normal” rainfall total, so even after the flooding, it’s still another drought year on our county level at least (with water use restrictions, etc.), with a number of local reservoirs at half capacity (true also elsewhere in the state). What fun! At least on the state level we have the snowpack…
Yeah, the people ultimately making the decisions were directly benefiting from getting all the water they wanted, consequences be damned - corrupt water politics meant everyone else went along with it. The local (urban area) water board is… a mess, to put it politely, more interested in keeping their seats (often using somewhat underhanded methods) than doing their jobs - I can’t even imagine how bad it is in agricultural counties. On the state level, they’ve deferred too much to farmers (who are, not coincidentally, big campaign contributors). It’s going to require federal intervention to fix things.
