Those artistic expressions are what taught and compelled me to pay more attention to water politics. To the noise like rapids around the corner I’d thought everyone could hear — until at my East Coast college I discovered that most of my peers from the 13 colonies had never heard about the someday water wars, and hadn’t had to grapple with the reality of dry wells or massive wildfires.
The static of those distant rapids has become a deafening roar. We’re not talking about some tame riffle downriver. We’re talking about hydrologic violence, and it’s right around the corner. It’s here. With massive boulders to crash upon, downstream holes where our greed can suffocate us.
Lake Powell (and Lake Mead) were made into reservoirs for multiple reasons. Among those was to meter water to downstream populations, to cities that were relatively small when the Colorado River Basin Compact was initially negotiated in 1922, back when the many native tribes still living across the Southwest were deliberately excluded from the conversations. Another reason was to use the force of that metered water to generate electricity for the region, technically a more sustainable and atmospherically clean alternative to burning oil or coal.
Anybody who’s been paying the slightest attention knows that the negotiators and the engineers miscalculated. The water cycle fluctuates. Rivers don’t carry the same volume of water year to year, with or without dams. Ever-increasing electricity needs from growing cities cannot be satiated indefinitely.
Lake Powell is currently less than 30 feet above minimum power pool. That’s the level at which the reservoir is capable of generating electricity, the level at which tubes feed the power-generating water turbines. Thirty feet of water sounds pretty deep — less so when you consider that water level has dropped about 4 feet in just the past month.
There are all kinds of forward thoughts to think, how to manage the continued dilemma of increasing demand for decreasing water and power capacity. How to reallocate water rights in the stuttering negotiations of a new Colorado River Compact because the old one isn’t working and neither the regional nor federal government seem able to democratically resolve it.
I get stuck on a hindsight one, that whole perfect vision score idiom. Building open water reservoirs in a desert was a pretty dumb idea. What did they think would happen?
Annalise can be contacted via email at annag2@rof.net.