Just like your stomach after a trip to Taco Bell, Longmont’s water supply is stable but fragile.
As Longmont continues to endure the effects of one of the driest winters in history, the City of Longmont offered an update on Longmont’s water situation. This comes after Longmont announced in May that it was cutting city water use by 10% across the board. Let’s start with the good news before flirting with anything too grim…
What’s been going right?
A cooler and wetter beginning to summer allowed Longmont to keep its water use lower than normal — although not by much. The city says through the end of June, water use citywide was running at about 98% of the 10-year average. Plus…
Button Rock Reservoir, Longmont’s highest-priority water storage, filled completely this year.
Using new metering technology, city crews found and fixed more than 40 leaks at parks this year, preventing the waste of an estimated 4 million gallons of water.
But…
With recent high heat sticking around longer than your teenage son who just graduated high school and is still “figuring it out,” demand for water has returned to typical levels.
Since 2026 snow runoff has ended, nearly all of the water Longmont uses will come from storage reservoirs, a shift that usually comes later in the season.
“July and August are Longmont’s highest water use months, so how we finish the summer matters most,” a city statement explained. “Once stored water is used, there’s no more until reservoirs refill next season, and next year’s supply depends on this winter’s snowpack.”
Big picture:
There does appear to be light at the end of the tunnel. A potentially historic El Niño has already started and could become one of the strongest on record, potentially even developing into a super El Niño. That bodes well for Colorado’s precipitation and snowpack, but a substantial improvement on drought is still in question.
“Summer rain helps lawns and gardens; however, it can’t refill reservoirs. Only next year’s snowpack can do that, and we won’t know how it looks until spring. That’s why conserving stored water now matters,” a City of Longmont press release stated