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(NEW YORK) — Several regions in the West could be facing worsening drought conditions, increased wildfire risk, and reduced water supplies due to record-breaking temperatures and minimal winter snowpack.

Much of the West has been coping with prolonged drought conditions that are now being worsened by historically low seasonal snowpack and persistent record-breaking temperatures. With mountain snowpack sharply reduced, the region’s water supplies are facing mounting challenges and elevated wildfire risk is occurring earlier than usual.

More than half of the West continues to experience drought conditions of varying intensity, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The ongoing drought was compounded by the region’s warmest winter on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The drought and record-warm winter were followed by unprecedented, record-breaking heat in March, further intensifying conditions across the region.

Rounds of rain and mountain snow are expected to impact parts of the West in the coming weeks.

However, a full recovery is unlikely in the near term, meaning many detrimental impacts could persist, or even intensify, through the rest of the year. However, the long-term outlook remains uncertain, with the strength of the upcoming monsoon season and the potential development of El Niño and other influential factors.

Record low snowpack
Every major river basin and state in the West is experiencing a snow drought, a period of abnormally little snowpack for the time of year, according to NOAA.

The snow drought has significantly worsened in recent weeks following the unprecedented record-breaking March heat in the region. Snowpack is a significant indicator of drought conditions but not the only one.

Many major river basins, including the Colorado River Basin, are experiencing record-low season-to-date snowpack levels. A key metric in assessing these conditions is snow water equivalent, the amount of water contained within the snowpack. It serves as a critical indicator of the West’s water supply, helping determine how much runoff will flow into rivers and reservoirs during the spring melt.

When there is a snow drought in the West, it means “there will be a lack of available water due to the low snowpack to meet the water supply demands of the critical economic sectors we have,” Jason Gerlich, regional drought early warning system coordinator for the NOAA-National Integrated Drought Information System, told ABC News.

While many areas received average or above-average precipitation in the fall and early winter, warmer temperatures led much of it to fall as rain rather than snow, resulting in unusually low snowpack, which typically acts as a natural reservoir.

“If winter precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, our relationship with water in the West becomes even shakier,” said Casey Olson, a climate scientist with the Utah Climate Center. “A gallon of winter rain that immediately runs off downstream is not nearly as helpful come July as a gallon of snowpack that melts in April or May. They are not equivalent gallons of precipitation in terms of our ability to use them when we need them the most.”

Snowpack across the western United States typically peaks in late March or early April, marking a critical point in the region’s water supply outlook. While additional mountain snowfall remains possible through April, and in some higher elevations, into May, recovery to normal snowpack is not climatologically possible at this point, Gerlich noted.

Drought on its own already stresses water supplies, agriculture, and ecosystems. But when winter fails to deliver significant mountain snow, those impacts can intensify. In some states, up to about 75 percent of water supplies can come from melting snow, according to the USGS.

Mounting water supply concerns
The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Major reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin remain well below average, the agency’s latest data shows, heightening concerns about water availability across the region.

Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the United States, is one of them. Water levels have dropped roughly 7 feet so far this year and are forecast to continue a gradual decline through the months ahead. Despite the recent drop, the reservoir remains more than 8 feet above its record low set in April 2023.

However, current projections suggest that level could be approached, or even challenged again, by late summer if dry conditions persist.

Denver Water, the city’s public water utility, announced water restrictions for the first time since 2013 on Wednesday, seeking a 20% reduction in water use.

“The snowpack within Denver Water’s collection system has deteriorated significantly and continues to decline,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “Snowpack levels in both basins are now the lowest observed in the past 40 years, with accelerated melting underway.”

Experts warn that restrictions are likely to expand in multiple states as the year progresses, barring significant changes.

Wildfire concerns increase; Long-term risk remains uncertain
A large portion of the West will likely face an elevated wildfire risk this spring and summer driven by low snowpack, dry soils, and above-average temperatures, leaving vegetation drier and more flammable than usual.

However, experts say the long-term wildfire outlook for the region is less certain than it might seem and the risk could vary in intensity in the coming months, depending on conditions.

“Low snowpack and fire don’t have a one-to-one relationship, but low snowpack can lead to an early start to the fire season,” Gerlich said.

The record-breaking March heat further dried the landscape, priming it for wildfires earlier than usual. Parts of Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico have already seen impactful wildfires this year. Experts say the long-term wildfire outlook hinges on how several key conditions develop over the next few months.

“One positive right now is that the last few years have resulted in limited growth of the fine fuels that are quick to burn, so that does help temper fire risk for areas in the West, however, the lack of snowpack this year presents conditions through the high timber forests where fire risk this summer could be very high,” Olson added.

The latest outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center shows an overall near-average risk of significant wildland fires across the West through May with a more widespread above-average risk unfolding across the Four Corners region, including parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona in June.

“The Southwest looks to continue with the warm and dry seasonal pattern. One source of optimism is for the possibility of an active monsoon pattern this summer,” said Olson. “An active monsoon system in general should provide some relief to portions of the Southwest states, the question remains exactly where that relief would focus, and we won’t have a good handle on that until later this spring.”

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(SAUKVILLE, Wis.) — Tom Uttech has lived on his 52-acre property in Saukville, Wisconsin, for nearly 40 years.

From outside Uttech’s home art studio, the landscape is filled with rolling hills, topped with wildflowers that build to the highest point in the township, where rows of evergreens that Uttech says he planted by hand in 1988 have since grown into mature trees.

“That kind of scares me because I didn’t think I was that old,” Uttech said of the trees that he’s watched grow over the decades.

The 83-year-old renowned landscape painter, whose work has been displayed at museums across the country, has spent hundreds of hours and years of work over the last few decades maintaining and curating his land into a sweeping prairie that has come to serve as the inspiration for his work and his livelihood.

It’s a lifetime of work that Uttech now says has come under threat after receiving a letter in the mail from his utility company informing him that a massive power line would need to be built through his property, undoing years of work and stripping away the muse for his art.

“I couldn’t believe it, and I still don’t,” Uttech told ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Schulze when asked what his initial reaction was to the news. “They’d be putting power lines that are 300 or something feet tall, taller than apparently the Statue of Liberty.”

Uttech later learned that the transmission line would be used to help power a massive $15 billion data center campus that’s set to be built on over 500 football fields’ worth of farmland in nearby in Port Washington — a signature part of the Trump administration’s $500 billion Stargate partnership with OpenAI and Oracle, which President Donald Trump hopes will help supercharge the artificial intelligence revolution. 

Uttech is facing what other residents in his town — and others around the country — are facing more and more: the risk of losing parts of his land to eminent domain, the government’s legal authority to seize private property for public use, in support of the growing expansion of AI data centers as the demand to power them continues to grow.

The threat, in some ways, is a physical manifestation of what many people like Uttech fear the artificial intelligence boom could mean for their work.

Across the United States there currently more than 3,000 data centers, and that number will soon grow by 1,200 more now under construction, according to Data Center Map, an industry service that tracks data center development.

​​”These facilities are so energy-intensive,” Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, told ABC News. “A single sort of warehouse can use as much electricity as a large U.S. city. The amount of new infrastructure that has to be built to power that facility is unlike anything we’ve seen in generations.”

The Trump administration has pushed to rapidly build and deploy AI with urgency, arguing it will be vital to stay ahead of rivals like China and protect national security.

“I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built,” Trump said at a White House event announcing the Stargate initiative last January. “So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.”

‘It’s going to transform our community’
In nearby Port Washington, Mayor Ted Neitzke wants to make sure that investment is made right in his town, which he says is desperate for it.

“It’s exciting because it’s going to transform our community, it’s going to create a tax base and jobs and secondary and tertiary workforce and opportunities that we have not even envisioned, and it’s going to lead us into a real renaissance,” said Neitzke, who told ABC News the project would bring thousands of new jobs and much needed tax revenue.

“In a few years when the financing and everything is all done and the deal solidifies, they will pay the overwhelming majority of property taxes for the citizens of the city of Port Washington,” he said.

A representative for the industry group Data Center Coalition, when asked about the Port Washington project, told ABC News that the industry is making “multi-billion-dollar investments across the nation, including Wisconsin, to advance the digital economy, and in the process, provide significant benefits to local communities.”

“These include creating hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, providing billions of dollars in economic investment, and generating significant local, state, and federal tax revenue that helps fund schools, transportation, public safety, tax relief for residents and small businesses, and other community priorities,” the group said.

On top of outcries from the community over growing eminent domain concerns, the project has ignited backlash from some residents who are fearful that, as has been the case in some other communities around the country, the data center’s potential stress on the current electrical grid could lead to higher electric bills.

Nationwide, electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025 — more than double the inflation rate of 2.9% — according to new analysis by Goldman Sachs economists, who said they “expect data centers to boost electricity demand significantly, accounting for about 40% of total power demand growth over the next five years.”

In response, activists in Wisconsin, led by the community group Great Lakes Neighbors, have organized protests including a rally at the state capitol earlier this month. The tensions in the city were on full display last December when multiple anti-AI data center protesters were arrested, and one was dragged out of the city council meeting after chanting “Recall, recall, recall,” directed at Mayor Neitzke, after her allotted time had ended.

“I did go to the council meeting purely intending to speak. I had a speech prepared. Again, I had spoken earlier in other council meetings,” Christine LeJeune, the protester who was forcibly removed from the council meeting, told ABC News about the incident, adding that from her perspective, “the message was if you speak out, then this is what will happen to you.”

Pressed on the arrests at the recent council meeting, Neitzke, who faced a failed recall attempt over his support for the data center project, defended law enforcement when asked about the incident, while adding that incidents like that are “not the norm here.”

“I stand right next to our police department,” Neitzke said. “I thought they were very kind. They were very cordial, multiple warnings. Please, please, please.”

The mayor told ABC News that amid the backlash over the project, he’s been on the receiving end of threats to him and his family.

“I can play you the voicemails of the threats I receive from all over the country to my family’s safety,” he said. “What I did not see coming was that our officers following the law and enforcing the law would lead to people threatening our physical safety. That’s not OK.”

Paying their own way
With the construction of the data center already underway, local activists around Port Washington are hoping to push for commitments from companies to cover increases to their bills and not pass any increases on to customers.

Both OpenAI and Oracle said in statements to ABC News that they were committed to paying their own way and said they would mitigate the impact of these data centers on customers and their electricity bills by pledging to build out renewable energy sources to create more power.

“In Wisconsin, and across all of our U.S. Stargate sites, we are committed to paying our own way on energy so that our operations do not increase local electricity prices,” OpenAI spokesperson Jamie Radice said in a statement. “Our Port Washington site will help support AI services used by millions of people and businesses across the country — the majority of whom use it for free — and it will bring jobs and long-term investment to the region.”

In a statement to ABC News, Oracle said, “In partnership with WE Energies, we’re paying our own way on energy so ratepayers’ bills and electric grid reliability are never impacted by our data center. Seventy percent of the energy used for the Port Washington campus will come from zero-emission sources, including wind, solar, and batteries. The project will add about 2,000 MW of new zero-emission power to Wisconsin’s grid, which means more reliable, affordable energy will be available to local families and businesses. Oracle — not ratepayers — will fund these electrical infrastructure upgrades.”

The fate of Uttech’s land rests with whether the American Transmission Company (ATC) moves forward with what the company has called either the “preferred route” for the new transmission lines — or the “preferred alternative route,” the latter of which follows existing transmission lines. The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, the state agency that regulates utilities, will review ATC’s project application for the data center, including the proposed route options, and will select the final route.

Vantage, the data center operator, told ABC News in a statement that it supports the alternative route and that they are “committed to being a good neighbor” and are “prioritizing investing in sustainable energy, minimizing local impact and partnering closely with the community to be an economic driver for the state while enhancing the daily lives of residents.”

“Residents and businesses in Port Washington will not see an increase in their electric bills due to this project,” the Vantage statement said.

A representative from ATC told ABC News that they consider “several factors such as cost to ratepayers, landowner impacts, environmental sensitivities, and engineering considerations when studying power line routes and locations for supporting infrastructure” and that “The route designated as ‘preferred’ offers a lower cost to ratepayers and maximizes the use of existing corridors.”

“We understand that others may favor the alternative route for different considerations,” the ATC representative said.

‘I’m not going to just roll over’
Uttech, who at 83 still regularly jumps on a four-wheeler to traverse his sprawling property in search of inspiration, is working with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, to take on the data center that could cost him his land.

“The use of eminent domain power must be the absolute last resort … This is not such a case,” the firm wrote in a letter to ATC. “We will do all we can to protect the Uttech family’s private property rights.”

“Building the power lines on their land would cause irreparable damage to the natural beauty and wildlife the Uttech family has spent decades developing, and which Tom enjoys as inspiration for his work,” WILL deputy council Lucas Vebber said.

While Uttech says he understands that AI is a growing billion-dollar industry that is already in motion and can’t be stopped, he is vowing to continue his fight.

“They brought the fight to me and I’m not going to just roll over,” he told ABC News, saying he plans to fight “right to the end.”

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(NEW YORK) — After Kouri Richins was charged with murder for fatally poisoning her husband with fentanyl, a friend of the Utah mother of three had a difficult time reconciling that.

In an exclusive interview with “20/20,” Ali Staking said she and her children were “devastated” about the sudden 2022 death of 39-year-old Eric Richins.

“I said, along the way, ‘Sometimes it looks like Kouri might have done it,'” Staking recalled saying to her children. “Then my kids would say, ‘Well, did she?’ And I’d say ‘I don’t think so. But, you know, it sometimes looks like it.'”

A Summit County jury ultimately found 35-year-old Kouri Richins guilty of aggravated murder on Monday, after prosecutors argued during the three-week trial that she killed her husband for financial gain by giving him a lethal dose of fentanyl in a cocktail.

Eric Richins was found dead in bed on March 4, 2022. An autopsy determined that he died from fentanyl intoxication, and the level of fentanyl in his blood was approximately five times the lethal dosage, according to the charging document. The medical examiner determined the fentanyl was “illicit fentanyl,” not medical grade, according to the charging document.

Kouri Richins, who self-published a children’s book on grief following her husband’s death, was arrested in May 2023 following a lengthy investigation.

The charges alleged that she spiked his drink with a lethal dose of fentanyl that she purchased illicitly, and that she also gave her husband a sandwich laced with fentanyl on Valentine’s Day two weeks before his death in an initial, failed attempt to kill him.

Prosecutors argued that Kouri Richins wanted a “fresh start” and to leave her husband, but didn’t want to leave his money. They said she was in “financial desperation” due to her house flipping business’ debts and needed a significant influx of cash immediately.

According to prosecutors, she believed she would have financially benefited from her husband’s death — without realizing that his assets were in a trust overseen by one of his sisters.

A jury found her guilty of all five counts, including aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder, after about three hours of deliberations on Monday. She was also found guilty of insurance fraud for taking out a $100,000 insurance policy on her husband’s life with his forged signature and also for submitting a claim following his death.

Kouri Richins, who had pleaded not guilty and asserted her innocence from jail, did not testify during the trial and the defense called no witnesses. Her sentencing has been scheduled for May 13. She faces 25 years to life in prison.  

Staking, who testified during the trial, said she was “very surprised that there was no defense.”

ABC News contributor Brian Buckmire suggested this was a reflection of the defense’s confidence.

“They may believe the prosecution didn’t make out their case, that having any witness on the stand wouldn’t make sense because they’ve already won their case,” he told “20/20.”

Staking said it was “surreal” learning that Eric Richins had died, describing him as a “dedicated dad” and a “goofy cowboy dude who loved to dance.”

“He had so much more life to live and he wanted so much for his boys,” she said. “I’m gonna remember just how much he loved them.”

Kouri Richins also faces more than two dozen charges in a separate case filed last year, including allegations that she committed mortgage fraud in 2021. The charging document alleges she submitted falsified bank statements in support of mortgage loan applications for her realty business, committed money laundering and issued bad checks. 

The charges in the case also allege she murdered her husband for financial gain as she “stood on the precipice of total financial collapse.”

She has not yet entered a plea to those charges.

Staking said she wants Eric Richins to be remembered as a “loving dad.”

“I believe Eric is with his kids all the time every day,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else he’d wanna be.” 

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