ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA. The municipal and industrial (M&I) water supply database traces its beginnings to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) first developed and maintained the database as agreements were reached. Fast forward a few decades to the first data call for the irrigation storage by the Corps in a 1982 survey of the districts. The first irrigation water supply database report was not released until 2013 with the integration of information from the Corps’ Operation and Maintenance Business Information Link (OMBIL) database. The Corps continued to publish reports on the M&I water supply database with information from the OMBIL database included in 2006 to automate the database updates.
Currently, the Corps maintains over 340 water supply storage agreements, with state and local interests at 136 reservoir projects spanning 23 districts and 25 states. In the Western U.S. 46 Corps reservoirs are authorized to support irrigation, typically in partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
There is approximately 9.8 million acre-feet of storage in Corps reservoirs that is authorized for M&I water supply use. This storage is capable of reliably supplying an estimated seven billion gallons of water per day during a severe drought, or about 17% of the water that is currently withdrawn from rivers and lakes in the U.S. for consumptive, municipal and industrial uses.
Prior to the Institute of Water Resources (IWR) release of the 2014 Municipal, Industrial and Irrigation Water Supply Database Report, the information found in the Corps M&I water supply database was published separately from the irrigation water supply database report. The report summarizes the authorities, policies, and procedures for both M&I and irrigation water supply, in addition to the database information from each water supply database.
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