Drought Boosts Campaign to Drain One of the West's Biggest Reservoirs

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Page 4 of 6 Glen Canyon was named by Maj. John Wesley Powell, one -armed Civil War veteran and leader of the first exploring party to travel by water through the heart of the canyon country. His party of 10 men departed Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, piloted four fragile wooden boats down the Green and Colorado rivers, and emerged three months later below the Grand Canyon. Glen Canyon Dam and the lake named for Maj. Powell are the subjects of regret, antipathy, even hatred, in the hearts of many American environmentalists. The dam's approval by Congress as part of the Colorado River Storage Project — a series of high dams in the river's upper basin, including Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green River in Utah, Navajo Dam on the San Juan River in New Mexico, and the Wayne Aspinall Unit (Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point dams) on the Gunnison River in Colorado — came during a ferocious debate in the late 1950s about the future of the West, the integrity of the national park system, and the proper balance between preservation and exploitation of the nation's resources. As originally proposed by the Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado River Storage Project was to include dams that would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah - Colorado border. Led by the Sierra Club, environmentalists fought off those dams, but the price of victory was their agreement to drop opposition to the remainder of the project, including Glen Canyon Dam. Those involved in the battle, notably David Brower, the Sierra Club's executive director at the time, later came to rue that compromise; when diversion tunnels around the dam were plugged in 1963, the rising water inundated a canyon complex that many who lived or traveled in the area regarded as the most lovely in the Southwest. "The loss of beautiful Glen Canyon due in part to my own inaction is one of my biggest regrets," Brower wrote in a 1999 fund- raising letter for the Glen Canyon Institute, which was established in 1995 with the goal of decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. "But what is lost does not have to remain so." Costs and Benefits Wary of being dismissed as impractical dreamers, environmentalists have for the past decade focused on cold facts and figures in making the case for Lake Powell's elimination. (In their scenario, the dam would remain but new diversion tunnels would be drilled through its flanking cliffs to let the river flow freely around it.) Some of their assertions draw little dispute from the Bureau of Reclamation and other defenders of the dam. Both sides in the debate agree that Lake Powell traps millions of tons of sediment each year and that the Colorado below the dam has been transformed from a warm and muddy river into one that is cold and clear. In consequence, beaches and sandbars have vanished from the Grand Canyon, eliminating not only camping spots for river runners but also wildlife habitat, and several species of native fish have been driven to extinction or its brink. Elimination of the huge floods that used to tear through the canyon each spring has allowed exotic plants such as tamarisk and Russian thistle to invade the river banks, displacing native vegetation. Both sides also agree that prodigious quantities of water are lost from Lake Powell to evaporation — 2 to 3 percent of its volume annually, according to the bureau, which amounts to as much as 800,000 acre -feet when the lake is full. That's more than the annual consumption of Los Angeles. Where the two sides part company most dramatically is on the benefit side of the equation. The bureau characterizes Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell as critical components of the West's plumbing and power system, generating 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually (enough for 400,000 households) and allowing water managers to store sufficient runoff during wet years to ensure adequate supplies for downstream users in California, Nevada, and Arizona when drought — such as the one now gripping the region — inevitably strikes. "If there ever was a period of time that demonstrated the critical nature of and need for Lake Powell, now is the time," said Wirth, who works in the Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado River Region office in Salt Lake City. "Without Lake Powell, without Lake Mead, without the Colorado River Storage Project, we wouldn't have made it to this point." Opponents of the dam argue that Lake Mead stores enough water for most purposes and that, even in drought, there has been enough water in the Colorado River to provide the legally mandated deliveries to states that share the watershed. If more storage is needed, they argue, it should be developed in underground basins and offstream reservoirs in the states that need it. They also contend that the West would not miss Glen Canyon Dam's kilowatts, which account for less than 3 percent of 8/27/2004