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. 1983. New water treatment plants were brought on line in tandem with reservoirs. The Marston Treatment Plant was built in 1928; Moffat Treatment Plant in 1937; and Foothills Treatment Plant in 1983. Similarly, as water collection and treatment facilities went forward, so did major transmission facilities. Manunoth conduits, some in excess of 100 inches in diameter, now form a backbone distribution system from the treatment plants, a system in which pumping is significantly reduced by virtue of water generally being conveyed to users by gravity. . . In the era before environmental regulation, Denver's planning consisted largely of turning to the next least costly, highest-yielding structural project to meet increased water demand. What succeeding water officials from 1868 to 1968 knew was how to build a system, and how to do it well. The water was available to the system in the spring snow~ melt of May, June, and July. The challenge was to capture it, store it, treat it, and distribute it as a permanent, reliable, high quality supply twelve months a year. . "Reliability" of supply became an overriding consideration in the Denver system. Denver Water had experienced periodic drought, including a devastating three-year dry period in the 1950s that reduced its reservoir storage to minor pools of water. This mid- 1950s' drought became the "drought of record" for the Denver system, with all raw water modeling and dry-year yields taking that period as their point of departure. The 1950s' episode pointed up a principal challenge of water supply planning: to reduce risk of water supply shortages to the lowest feasible level. That challenge was often resolved by engineering and money. By carefully deploying both, Denver built a system of I I storage reservoirs; 4 sizable tunnels through the mountains; 3 treatment plants; 2,500 miles of pipe; 24 pump stations; 18 treated water reservoirs; a state-of-the-art water quality lab; and a successful potable reuse demonstration plant. The Denver system now serves a customer base of almost a million people. . . . Denver's water system can store 570,000 acre-feet; it annually yields an average of 485,000 acre-feet, with a reliable or firm yield of 345,000 acre-feet. The system has a maximum treatment capacity of approximately 700 million gallons per day. Were the need to arise and the dollars be available, that treatment capacity could be expanded to almost one billion gallons a day by doubling the size of the Foothills Plant. Overall, the replacement cost of the collection, storage, treatment, and distribution system has variously been estimated at anywhere between $3 billion and $6 billion; in reality, Denver's system is essentially irreplaceable. . The 1970s and 1980s . By the early 1970s, with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CW A), the Forest Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDW A), the Wilderness Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Denver Water was faced with a regulatory environment that would forever change its way of doing business. This new . 4 .