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,---I Animas-La Plata /1993 ----.,"'''11' - .'f,ili!"". --;; ififff/lft --. I I \ DlIyJl""T ~lbf.Y510E: l>OWN Animas-La Plata: The"last big dam in the West March 22. 1993 By Steve Hinchman DURANGO, Colo. - The late 1980s were bitter years for the West's water establish- ment, as giant and once-invincible water pro- jects dropped like flies. In the Jast five years, Colorado's Two Forks Dam, North Dakota's Garrison Project, Cliff Dam in Arizona, and the Central Utah Project, to name a few, were all either killed, changed beyond recognition, or indefinitely delayed. Only the $640 million Animas-La Plata Project in southwestern Colorado sailed on. While often criticized as an extravagant and hopelessly complicated Rube Goldberg scheme, Animas-La Plata is the one surviving big-ticket item in the Bureau of Reclamation's construction budget. Chances are, it will be the last of the West's great federal water projects. Animas-La Plata is not a made-in- Washington, D.C., project or even a widely supported Colorado project. Its roots are in Durango, where backers seem impervious to the water reformation around them. Here, 400 miles from Denver and Two Forks, and isolat- ed behind the San Juan Mountains, Animas-La Plata is considered a done deaL This scrappy mountain town, set in the steeply walled Animas River Valley, has always believed that its future depended on whether it could wet the arid mesas of the surrounding countryside and develop the Indian reservations and coal fields farther south. Loyalty to Animas is a prerequisite for public life in Durango, and pursuit of the project has dominated regional I I Warer projects appear to be i made up of '. dams and cast.: iron pipes and ;: huge pumps.,' ~ But they are ; actually createcB by political ,j~ I't' d ~ coa I Ions, an ;~i the stronger :l and more derermined the coalition, the more likely the project is to be built. e 1996 High COuntry News - 13'