DELICATE WATER ZONE · D4 — Exceptional drought over a member dam
Denver, Colorado
Denver drinks from both sides of the divide: Dillon banks West Slope snowmelt for the Roberts Tunnel, and Cheesman — the system's 1905 anchor — regulates the South Platte mainstem. The state's own telemetry reports their storage daily; storage is the whole story here, because no public elevation series reports at either dam.
What this desk cannot see: Gross Reservoir and the Moffat collection system — the system's other half, mid-expansion at Gross — report no open telemetry this desk can verify, so the north side of Denver's supply is a named gap.
The reservoirs this zone drinks from
| Reservoir | % full | Storage | Elevation | 30-day trend | Drought at the dam |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dillon Reservoir CO | 69.1% | 177,748 af | no reading | -474 af/day | D4 — Exceptional drought |
| Cheesman Reservoir CO | 66.9% | 52,916 af | no reading | -120 af/day | D3 — Extreme drought |
af = acre-feet; a dash means the measure is not published for that reservoir. Each name links to the reservoir's full page — gauge, record, snowpack and sources.
Zone prose is curated by this desk with its sourcing inline; the numbers are the member reservoirs' own operators', on the bases named on each reservoir's page. Back to the national desk.