Posted on 11/05/2021 1:37:40 PM PDT by AFreeBird
The date is Feb. 9, 1997, and the man responsible for one of the most egregious environmental follies in human history is sitting at a restaurant in Boyce, Virginia, with the leader of the movement seeking to undo his mistake. Of the hundreds of dams Floyd Dominy green lit during his decade running the Bureau of Reclamation, none are as loathed as his crown jewel, the Glen Canyon Dam. In 1963, Dominy erected the 710-foot (216-meter) tall monument to himself out of ego and concrete, deadening the Colorado River just upstream of the Grand Canyon, drowning more than 250 square miles (648 square kilometers) in the heart of the Colorado Plateau, and inventing Lake Powell in the middle of a sun-baked desert.
After a couple of drinks, Dominy asked his dinner guest, Glen Canyon Institute founder Richard Ingebretsen, for an appraisal of the effort to drain Lake Powell. “It’s pretty serious, Mr. Dominy,” Ingebretsen recalled telling him, holding back the seething discontent of the broad coalition he represented. When Ingebretsen described his hypothetical plan to drill through the twin boreholes bestriding Glen Canyon dam, Dominy replied, “Well, you can’t do that. It is 300 feet of reinforced concrete.” Then Dominy did something extraordinary—he lowered his glasses, pulled out a pen, and diagrammed precisely how he would do it on a cocktail napkin. A stunned Ingebretsen could hardly believe what was happening.
“This has never been done before,” Dominy said. “But I have been thinking about it, and it will work.”
Nearly 25 years later, the campaign to bypass Glen Canyon Dam has never been stronger. Now may seem like an odd time to make the case for draining the second-largest reservoir in the country, with the West in the depths of a megadrought unmatched since the Medieval Period. Tree ring cores and remote sensing data indicate a paucity of soil moisture unseen in at least 1,200 years. Lake Powell itself, along with reservoirs across the West, are at record lows, and climate change is set to exact an even more severe toll with rising temperatures killing the snowpack that feeds them, evaporating what are essentially ponds in the middle of the desert. Yet it is the drought itself that has revealed precisely why now is the moment to execute Dominy’s plan to bypass his dam, lower Lake Powell to river level, and restore Glen Canyon….
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I thought it was interesting in light of the water issues out west.
There are 1000s of tons of toxic metals and materials that have been deposited at the bottom of that lake from the Colorado rivers. Dry up the lake, and all of that blows around the region.
Peter Deneen does not rely on water from Lake Powell to survive. Peter Deneen is another eco-wacko with a lot of degrees but no sense.
Thanks for later reading research
I just drove through Page, where the dam is, and the museum is closed. Covid I guess. I have spent a week on Lake Powell and loved it. What do they think they will gain by draining. I have heard many theories but the water is there and can be used to help out the COlorado River through this drought. The drought will end in a year or so, as they come in waves. Texas was in a drought for 5 years for almost the whole state, and then one month of rains finised that off.
Or we could excavate it, load on trains, and landfill in California!
Since there is no man-made climate change, making anything better or worse, what is the case against the dam?
So how do they replace the 5 billion annual mega watts of electricity?
Where did the toxic metals come from? I’m not from around there, so I don’t know.
I try. We spend so much time with politics around here, it’s easy to forget all the other moving parts around us.
And I like interesting.
Buy from China on a long cable?
Well, if I read the article correctly, it’s actually hurting downstream Colorado River. Lake Powell is a reservoir for a reservoir (Mead). Which actually sounds a little screwed up to me.
That and you end up with two massive bodies of water that the desert air sucks up in addition to encouraging everyone else to suck up what’s left, which just exacerbates the situation. And California is the biggest suck for all all that water and they’re not even adjacent.
The mayor of Page actually sounds rather pragmatic and even optimistic in a way over the change in circumstances for his town.
That might clarify things a bit; just follow the money...
Stir it up and flush it down to LA.
Probably from mining operations in Colorado and Utah.
I don't know nearly enough about the subject to have a strong opinion on this in either direction, but I can state unequivocally that Lake Powell provides for some of the most beautiful vistas in the United States.
releasing all of the water in Lake Powell will do nothing to add water anywhere else. It stores the water behind Lake Powell, then it goes out later when needed to fill up lower down dams.
All the downstream dams like Mead,Davis, Lake Havasue and on down are low and filled with silt gathered at the north side of the dams..
Oldtimers up there have predicted a dam break for decades. Any dam breaking would be a mega tragedy. The whole Carl Hayden boon doggle has been an ecological disaster.
I rode over Hoover Damn on my way out to San Diego once. That’s the extent of my direct experiences with that watershed.
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