One morning in mid-February, David Herz went to turn on the faucet in his farmhouse outside the small western Colorado town of Paonia, and nothing came out.
Herz is the president of a small water company that purchases treated drinking water from the town for him and a few of his rural neighbors. Small outages are common enough not to raise alarm. Herz started calling around to see what was happening.
"We usually average about one [outage] a year on the line," he said. "Something breaks, and you have to turn the water off. So it's not uncommon."
He quickly found he wasn't the only person with a dry tap who relies on Paonia's water. What he didn't know at that point was how long the shortage would last. From mid-February to early March, most of the town's about 1,600 water customers were issued boil notices and eventually saw their water turned off for a combined 13 days.
Conversations in the Colorado River Basin about impending wide-ranging water shortages have created an anxiety in pockets of the West. It's akin to a modern folk tale, a story passed from one person to the next, that one day water will be so scarce, whole communities will see their faucets turned off. That hasn't happened on a wide scale, but this winter Paonia got a taste of that possible future.
