BOULDER CITY, June 13 -- The Hoover Dam, the 1936 art deco wall of concrete that powered the rise of Los Angeles and gave its name to a president, is on track to lose seventy percent of its electricity-generating capacity inside the next twelve months. The reason is one number on a stick gauge in the desert outside Las Vegas. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States and the dam's only source of pressure, is sitting at 1,050 feet above sea level. At 1,035 feet, twelve of the dam's seventeen turbines stop. That second number, according to a Brett Walton report for Circle of Blue and Inside Climate News published Thursday, will be reached, conservatively, by late summer 2026 or spring 2027.

"We're going to go to 1,035," Tom Bus...