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<br />The charts on pages 26 and 27 illustrate some of the pertinent historical <br />facts related to the amounts of water produced by the Colorado River <br />System above Lee Ferry, Arizona, the compact division point between the <br />Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins. The first chart, on page 26, is <br />entitled Colorado River Flow at Lee Ferry, Arizona. The top of each <br />vertical bar represents the estimated virgin flow of the river, i.e., the flow <br />of the river in millions of acre-feet past Lee Ferry for a given year had it not <br />been depleted by activities of man. Each vertical bar has two components: <br />The lower shaded part represents the estimated or measured historic flow <br />at Lee Ferry, and the difference between the two sections of the bar in any <br />given year represents the stream depletion, or the amount of water <br />estimated to have been removed by man from the virgin supply upstream <br />from Lee Ferry. It is worth noting that in 1977 and again in 1981 the <br />historic flow at Lee Ferry exceeded the virgin flow. Beginning in 1962, <br />part of this depletion at Lee Ferry was caused by the retention and storage <br />of water in storage units of the Colorado River Storage Project. The <br />horizontal line (at approximately 15 million acre-feet) shows the long- <br />term average virgin flow from 1896 through 1991. Because the Colorado <br />River eompact is administered on the basis of running averages covering <br />periods of ten years, the progressive ten-year average historic and virgin <br />flows are displayed on this chart. <br /> <br />The second chart on page 27, entitled Lee Ferry Average Annual Flow <br />for Selected Periods, is a graphical representation of historic and virgin <br />flow averages for several periods of record. The periods of water years <br />selected were those to which reference is usually made for various purposes <br />in documents pertaining to the Colorado River System. <br /> <br />25 <br />