Dale Maharidge: It’s time to drill holes in Glen Canyon Dam and empty Lake Powell.
on the Utah-Arizona border cut off the reddish sediment that naturally eroded the Grand Canyon. Today the river runs vodka clear from the base of the dam., the reservoir above the dam. Each day on average for the past 60 years, the equivalent of 61 supersize Mississippi River barge-loads of sand and mud have been deposited there. The total accumulation would bury the length of Manhattan to a depth of 126 feet — close to the height of a 12-story building.
Now the future is here. With Lake Powell just 23 percent full, and Lake Mead, outside of Las Vegas, at 28 percent capacity, it’s time to stop trying to “save” Lake Powell. It should be abandoned and its water stored in Lake Mead. In 1983, I camped on the shore of the lake next to the late Dave Foreman, a co-founder of Earth First! He’d come to protest the 20th anniversary celebration of the dam. We spent the night drinking from a case of beer. Two years earlier, Earth First! activists unfurled a 300-hundred foot sheet of plastic over the face of the dam, simulating a crack. The lake seemed very permanent. It was brimming full.
River raft guides were among the first people to pay attention to the delta. As the reservoir level dropped, ugly, gooey mud flats were exposed, making camping difficult. “It was a wasteland that wasn’t safe to step on,” said Mike DeHoff, a semiretired river guide whose boat shop in Moab, Utah, has become a command center for studying the sediment.
Mr. DeHoff noted that the Bureau of Reclamation regularly monitored sediment in the early years of the reservoir. But it stopped in the wet years of the 1980s, saying it would take 7 centuries for Lake Powell to fill with soil. Picking an exact date for when the San Juan’s mud plug travels the final 20-plus miles to Glen Canyon is in the realm of a wager for Las Vegas bookies. It will certainly someday arrive. When depends entirely on snow and rainfall in the Colorado River watershed, and how much water is used.
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