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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There is a movement out there to drain Hetch-Hetchy and they don’t want any desalinization plants.
The California problem may just take care of itself.
Sacrameto, CA last week got over 6 inches of rain in three days, more than Sacto got in the entire 2020-2021 water season (July 1 to June 30). The Sierra ski resorts are open a month early and snowpack is huge.
I’ve lived in California for nearly 50 years and have been through many drought cycles with environmentalists going nuts in every cycle.
If you read Steinbeck (especially “To a God Unknown”), you learn that the California cycles of drought and plentiful rain have been happening for a long time.
It was the superintendent of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area who made that remark; the mayor of Page sounded less sanguine.
"While Diak sees the diminishing lake as “problematic” for his community, faulting decades of over-allocation of water compounded by drought and climate change, he understands the bigger picture."
I've been to these areas several times in the last few years, and I would only caution that this is a difficult time to count tourists, if for no other reason than international travel to the national parks/recreation areas is down significantly and domestic travel has increased during Covid. Prior to 2020, one could easily hear several different languages a day in the area around Page (one of the gas stations in town has instructions on the pump in English, French, and German); I can state from personal experience that this has not been the case there either this year or last.
As I said earlier, I don't know enough about the subject to feel passionate either way (except to emphasize that its scenery is stunning).
Razorback sucker, bonytail chub, Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub - these are important.
Water and recreation - not important.
Remember when the Feds breached a mine wall at Silverton Colorado back during the Obama admin and sent all that water down the Animas River into the San Juan river, and on into the Colorado River and into Lake Powell.
How many remember when the original plan was to have two more dams on the Colorado. One below Lake Powell an one above Lake Mead.
***it would almost certainly turn Page into a ghost town. ***
My thoughts exactly. I remember when those were being built back in the early 1970s.
The Page coal plants is what I meant! Now gone.
Out here in the West. Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.
I’m just a midwesterner so what do I know. All I know is what I’ve read about water and environmental issues in that region going back a century or more.
It just seems to me that people are pulling more from a resource than what the resources can provide on a consistent basis without much in the way of dealing with extended issues.
The plains states, as I’ve read, are having issues withe aquifer resources they call upon to keep farms viable. Refilling aquifers takes a lot of time I imagine.
Like I said; I don’t know. I don’t have a dog in that particular hunt. Regardless of the reasons/causes, it’s becoming an issue.
The reason I posted the article was because I thought it was an interesting and important subject and I wanted to get the take from our more directly affected FReeper brethren.
I’ve heard that.
Water is life.
Define recreation.
I’m not sure the place would disappear completely but I think it would draw a different type of tourist (20-30 year-old hikers) and without the families coming for water activities (swimming and boating), I think the demand for hotels and restaurants would only come down.
They get a bunch of Teslas and then use them to run treadmills that will generate enough electricity to replace the dam. Sheesh, do I have to solve all the problems for you??
I’m not qualified to comment on the water/damn issues, but I’ll comment on the lake. We first visited in 2000 when it was last full, then proceeded to fish it for 10 years. Saw all 190 miles end to end. Absolutely beautiful, not to mention good fishing. During our time fishing the water level changed so frequently it was no small issue navigating. You needed good radar, lots of shear rock walls 3-500 ft up and down. Quite unique actually. It’ll be a beautiful area with or without the lake cause the Colorado river isn’t going anywhere no matter what they do. I highly recommend a visit before it disappears if you’ve never been. There’s nothing else like it in the US. They rent boats. Take a couple gas cans and a sandwich, you can get from one end to the other. We did it in a little 18’ fishing boat.
The author seems to be inferring that the amount of mountain runoff coming down the Colorado River has been in a consistent decline, which I find hard to believe. It was only in the last two or three years that the amount of snowfall in the Rocky Mountains was such that the spring surge was bigger than anticipated; I remember this item in particular because I had been at Lake Powell that spring.
I would also question the author's (repeated) references to "global warming" as one of the causes of Lake Powell's problems, not only because I think this is a natural phenomenon tied to solar activity, but because the population growth in the immediate vicinity of the Colorado River and the dams (and its related demand for water) has apparently been exponential in the last 20-30 years.
(I would say that if there is genuine talk about pulling the plug on that dam and letting the water level fall to a natural level, get out there to see it before it happens.)
the 710-foot (216-meter) tall monument to himself out of ego and concrete
Like Windmills?
“What do they think they will gain by draining.”
What I’ve discovered about most so called environmentalists is that they don’t give a crap about the environment.
What they care about is their “precious sensibilities”. In this case they would prefer a wild running river over what most people see as a beautiful lake and precious resource.
I don’t mind a wild running river but I also very much like a large lake with lots of water that can be used for agriculture, households, as a store during a dry period as a generator of CO2-free electricity, as a big recreation area...
These spoiled children are nothing but selfish, virtue signaling fools who drape who wrap themselves around “mother earth” as a way to get what they want.
Mother earth couldn’t care less whether there is a running river or a lake there or whether a big meteor hits it tomorrow and splits into smithereens. But for humans it makes a huge difference.
We took a trip through all the canyons of Arizona and Utah last year. The thing that hit me was that all those canyons were built by earth’s own DESTRUCTIVE forces, wind, rain, and erosions. If man were to do the same thing that earth did to itself these spoiled brats would go ballistic.
As a matter of fact we did - it’s called lake Powell, Lake Mead, beautiful skylines, etc, all just as beautiful as what nature created through its DESTRUCTIVE forces.
Why we, so called adults, let these pimpled faced, unclean, irresponsible spoiled brats have so much control over our lives is beyond me.
The evaporation of the water, feeds the clouds that feed the snow and rain, that then feeds the river. It is more likely that draining the lake, will result in more drought.
Dictator Inslee in WA state has as part of his plan to move to “watermelon energy”, first classifying the dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers as non-renewable, then breaching the dams to restore salmon habitat. Of course THAT won’t affect power supply and rates over at least 4 states at all. The idiots Just Don’t CARE.
More likely is river towns tend to get their water from well which the river feeds. A distinction with a difference. Believe it or not every drop in the Colorado River is spoken for.
More dams equals more prosperity, and life. The Solar and Wind NRG Fads, will equal poverty and death of many nations. One of them I love very much. America, the ideal and the actual Nation of peoples we once had.
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