Recreational Instream Flow Workshop Tanscription of Meeting Tape

Home Browse Search

7 Gary Lacy It can, the rating classification have other factors too. Not only gradient and obstacles in there, but it is the amount of flow it's the temperature of the water. There's a lot of factors that go into that to jump from three to five especially in these types of structures that would be quite a stretch it might be 2 minus to 3 plus kind of thing. If the flow rate goes up so I guess the other thing I have seen is that most of these are targeted to the lower end novice paddlers and that even with them the more water the better the paddling is. And up to some ridiculous flood stage of course. But generally the hydraulics, the power everything gets a little stronger when the water goes up....but it's not something that all the sudden the safety factor goes off the chart. And in fact the one thing I want to be careful with too is there is a flow and the dry stream bed is the one extreme where it's totally worthless and then there is the very low flow which its totally worthless for what it is designed for but the fish stay alive and you can scratch your boat and get down the thing. There are those kind of flows. But there is a flow in there where these waves jump up and its just real obvious, they come up and they are standing waves and you can get on them and they react the way they are supposed to. And even if there is more water and more water, that wave stays there and gets a little bigger sometimes and gets a little more powerful and that is the flow rate and range that what we are shooting for. Eric-Wilkinson One more Unidentified speaker O.K. To try to get at this if it were a real wide riverbed and you were working with a real small flow then the bed would have to narrowed right down like you were saying. In a natural situation there might be cliffs that close in a river. If you were in a town like Salida and you didn't have that the wider river would have to be channeled way down. So would it be true that, you can correct me if this is mistaken at all. Would it be true that the less water in proportion to what would naturally be in that river bed, the more expensive the project would have to be and the more ridiculous or sort of out of place it would become in the sense that a wide river would have to be channeled down into a little canal in order to make that water produce anything interesting as it flows over and around these rocks. Gary Lacy That's that's .... I would agree with that its not real attractive so see a huge wide dry river bed with tons of rock and just a little narrow slot in there. Naturally whatever that is that I think, like we said earlier, is what was there at existing conditions at the start of this project is what I am dealt with. Greg Walcher First of all the condition that you just described is the state of nature, in a lot rivers, in Colorado. Where you have in the absence of human activity massive rivers and streams in the spring that reduce themselves to trickles in the fall. So there isn't anything particularly unnatural about that condition. But just to clarify what I was getting at earlier is exactly what Steve was saying, and as usual Steve and I are on the same wavelength. Patty talked about how you I don't think you design one of these things in a complete vacuum you disclaim personal involvement in the upstream water rights issues and so on. But you don't design one of these with out having any clue what the legal environment is of that river. You have to understand what may happen that may affect the water that all I was asking about earlier. You need to know, I assume, what kind of conditional rights there are upstream from it that may eventually get developed and what kind of absolute rights there are that are senior to it downstream. So you know what, you have some picture of the water rights I assume before you design one of these things, so you don't over - design it for some amount of water that's never going to be there or that may not be . there two years from now. And what I was asking is that doesn't prevent you from designing anything at all. It just says lets be realistic and design something can work in the current legal environment of that river and then that would avoid conflicts with water users, right? Gary Lacy No I agree with that, I mean, obviously you look at especially the last thirty years and seeing what's there and if the city knows for a fact that water is going to be half of that next year you know that would be major design changes or something like that. But there's other factors, and the other one is