At one time, the Colorado River stretched for more than 2000 kilometers. But since the eighties at the latest, it has been losing water and hardly reaches the delta in the south.
Around 40 million people depend on the river for agriculture or drinking water, including 30 indigenous communities in the United States and Mexico. Lake Mead, near the city of Las Vegas, has less than a third of the possible water volume and experts fear that the water level could soon be too low to drive turbines of the dam.