**Este artículo se puede encontrar en español.** In 2023, Arizona, California and Nevada are on track as a group to use less Colorado River water than they have in nearly 40 years, as recently pointed out by John Fleck—renowned author on Colorado River issues. That’s great news, due in part to late summer storms in the Southwest, and the extraordinarily wet winter of 2022-2023 that not only helped to raise the Colorado River’s emptying reservoirs, but also gave Southern California’s cities a gusher of in-state supply, enabling them to use less than their full share of Colorado River water and save it for another day. Yet the real story here isn’t the past year’s wet weather, but rather the dry years that preceded it. In January 2023, more than 20 years of drought exacerbated by 蜜柚APP change left the Colorado River reservoirs so low that the states had started working with the federal government on emergency measures to reduce the risk of “dead pool,” the...