Despite Calif. rains, America's largest reservoir remains in peril |
FILE: Recent data shows Lake Mead was only 33% full at the end of 2025.
It’s been raining buckets in California, but one of the state’s largest suppliers of drinking water in neighboring Nevada was at a troublingly low level yet again at the end of 2025.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows that the water elevation at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam was 1,062.24 feet at the end of December. That’s the lowest it’s been during this time of the year since 2022, when it was 1,044.82 feet. Before that, levels were the lowest in 1936, when the region experienced a severe drought.
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Lake Mead stored 8.59 million acre-feet of water on Dec. 31, according to USBR data. The lake can store about 26 million acre-feet of water, meaning it was only about 33%........