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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You probly passed Hayduke on the river
Every time I drove over the dam back then I thought it was gonna blow, always looked for a crack
Earth First crazies prowling the canyons, specially Cataract Canyon
Remember sitting inna bar on 4th Ave in ‘82 listening to some woman calling Ed Abbey a Nazi cuz his comment on illegal immigrants was “meet em at the border, give em a gun, turn em around, they’ll know what to do when they get back to Mexico”
Thought he was dead on
The VAST quantities of water drawn to grown FUEL for cars is insane. Ethanol lowers fuel mileage, and returns 75% of the potential power needed to create it to add to fuel to burn. I believe it takes 1.47 gallons of Legacy fuel, to make 1 gallon of ethanol. The ethanol is made from corn, which could go to feed animals, and HUMANS.
If you want to slow the drain of water from Midwestern aquifers, start with the total wasting of land a resources to make fuel we can easily get if we get our oil production back up to Trump Presidency levels.
I suppose that Elon Musk could sell a dynamo attachment to each Tesla. When the car is fully charged, the owner could use the battery’s energy to refresh the grid.
Give me a few minutes to run that past by environmental-whacko friends before I propose it formally.
Sarc off\|
Ethanol is like food stamps (EBT).
The ag lobby has a LOT of horsepower.
What about my $500,000 House Boat? /s
They might as well blow the dam. Sin City Vegas is drinking up both Lake Powell and Mead. Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles will one day dry up and blow away. Man was never meant to build huge cities in these bone dry areas...it is unnatural. These cities will go the way of Chaco Canyon and the Anasazi.
Kanab & Page were packed a month ago. Page would survive either way, but reducing storage capacity doesn’t make sense.
“the population growth in the immediate vicinity of the Colorado River and the dams”
About 70% of SW water goes to growing crops. In Arizona, the most water intensive crops are then sent to China and Europe. Cities don’t use much water. Orchards and certain crops do.
So many people run off at the mouth without ever knowing the facts. Having lived in Las Vegas every drop is counted. The casino’s use less than 3% of the whole State of Nevada’s allotment and bring in 40,000,000+ visitors per year it is a great of water engineering,recycling and conservation not duplicated anywhere else in the world. Only Israel is more advanced with no where close to that many people per year.
Vegas and indeed all of Nevada gets the smallest share of Colorado River water they get at most 300,000 acre feet per year. California gets 7 million and dumps 5 million of that growing grass aka alfalfa in the deserts so Saudis can feed their cows no less. Vegas recycles every drop of water that hits a drain in the basin.
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/pdfiles/crcompct.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia
https://www.snwa.com/water-resources/current-water-supply/index.html
Using the author’s own figures, what this really boils down to is that by bypassing the Glen Canyon Dam, draining Lake Powell, and sending more water to Lake Mead, considering both Lake Mead and Lake Powell: Roughly 50,000 acre-feet of water seepage (into the aquifer mostly) and evaporation would be saved. (More than 50k would be “saved” at Lake Powell, but losses at a fuller Lake Mead partially offset the savings at Lake Powell.)
However, some of the seepage returns to the system further downriver, and some of it helps sustain the aquifer and wells tapping into it, arguably reducing direct demands on the surface system. I’m going to guess the evaporation and seepage figures are for the reservoirs when reasonably full.
So... as a guess but a conservative one (of course!), the true savings might be around 35,000 acre-feet per year. That’s not really THAT much water.
Let’s analyze it in terms of comparison with the Ohio River at it’s confluence with the Mississippi River, and, to throw in an additional limitation, let’s say the Ohio can only sustain water being diverted from it 100 days a year.
35,000 acre-feet in 100 days is 350 acre-feet / day = 431,718 m^3 / day = 5 m^3 / second.
AVERAGE flow of the Ohio River at it’s confluence with the Mississippi River is estimated at 7,960 m^3 /s.
Also note that Saudi Arabia’s desalinization plant at Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia, cranks out 1,036,000 m^3/day.
https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-largest-desalination-plants/
Other sources state the plant at al-Jubail makes over 1.4 million cubic meters of water daily:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-water-desalination-idUSKBN26Y1HD
Considering the significant benefits of Lake Powell, this is a solvable problem and the solutions are in CA. The upper watershed managers should tell the lower watershed managers just that.
Using the author’s own figures, what this really boils down to is that by bypassing the Glen Canyon Dam, draining Lake Powell, and sending more water to Lake Mead, considering both Lake Mead and Lake Powell: Roughly 50,000 acre-feet of water seepage (into the aquifer mostly) and evaporation would be saved. (More than 50k would be “saved” at Lake Powell, but losses at a fuller Lake Mead partially offset the savings at Lake Powell.)
However, some of the seepage returns to the system further downriver, and some of it helps sustain the aquifer and wells tapping into it, arguably reducing direct demands on the surface system. I’m going to guess the evaporation and seepage figures are for the reservoirs when reasonably full.
So... as a guess but a conservative one (of course!), the true savings might be around 35,000 acre-feet per year. That’s not really THAT much water.
Let’s analyze it in terms of comparison with the Ohio River at it’s confluence with the Mississippi River, and, to throw in an additional limitation, let’s say the Ohio can only sustain water being diverted from it 100 days a year.
35,000 acre-feet in 100 days is 350 acre-feet / day = 431,718 m^3 / day = 5 m^3 / second.
AVERAGE flow of the Ohio River at it’s confluence with the Mississippi River is estimated at 7,960 m^3 /s.
Also note that Saudi Arabia’s desalinization plant at Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia, cranks out 1,036,000 m^3/day.
https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-largest-desalination-plants/
Other sources state the plant at al-Jubail makes over 1.4 million cubic meters of water daily:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-water-desalination-idUSKBN26Y1HD
Considering the significant benefits of Lake Powell, this is a solvable problem and the solutions are in CA. The upper watershed managers should tell the lower watershed managers just that.
Oops, sorry for double post!
You betcha - I've seen that on other threads. Water still tends to flow down hill; water rights still tend to be negotiable; destroying "sunk cost" assets can be incredibly foolish; and 'following the money' can often be quite informative...
;>)
I wonder why they couldn't just let the water drain and keep the dam there in case there was sufficient water to stop it up again. (In other words, do what they want but allow for a return to the lake if warranted.)
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