You should notice a pattern of rapidly varying water height in the Lake Mead chart above from 1935 until the mid-1960s, after which the water level became more consistent in the short term. My theory is this smoothing was caused by the fact that Lake Powell, upstream from Lake Mead, began to fill in 1966,…
In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?
And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming.
