In Utah, reservoirs face “dead pool” status | Opinion

In 1998, when I was in fourth grade, I went on a class field trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. But when we arrived in Cortez, the street was barricaded. Hours earlier, three men stole a water tanker and killed a police officer before fleeing into the desert.

In his book Dead Run, author Dan Schultz argues that the criminals were inspired by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. The men were survival artists who wanted to convert the water truck into a mobile bomb, says Schultz. Their likely goal: load the tanker truck with explosives and blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

At the time, the idea of ​​draining Lake Powell was a fringe idea that was attractive to anti-government extremists and radical environmentalists. Those who advocated legal decommissioning of the Glen Canyon Dam, including supporters of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, were often laughed at.

During these years the dam functioned as intended. Lake Powell was nearly full in the late 1990s. Hydroelectric power production was in full swing and millions of people visited the reservoir annually to fish, houseboat and water ski.

But since 2000, Lake Powell has been in decline. Climate change has reduced runoff across the Colorado River Basin by about 20% compared to the previous century. As of 2022, the reservoir – the second largest in the country after Lake Mead – was less than a quarter full.

Nearly every boat ramp on Lake Powell was unusable last spring and there was barely enough water to sustain hydroelectric power generation. Another bad snow year would have pushed the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse and lowered the reservoir’s surface toward the deepest outlets of Glen Canyon Dam – a point known as the “dead pool.”

In Dead Pool, the 27 million people who rely on Colorado River water downstream of the dam would likely be forced to quickly and involuntarily reduce water use.

But Lake Powell would still extend 100 miles into Glen Canyon at Dead Pool.

That’s because the dam has a significant design flaw: there is no drain at the bottom. Billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the Dead Pool Reservoir with no easy way to drain it into the Grand Canyon.

Fortunately, this catastrophic scenario did not occur in 2023, as Lake Powell was about 40% full in a year of near-record snowfall. After another decent runoff this spring, the reservoir level remained stable.

The 24-year low water levels in Lake Powell weren’t all bad either. As of early 2023, over 100,000 hectares of land that was once submerged have been uncovered, including countless cultural sites sacred to indigenous peoples. Along Glen Canyon’s tributaries, entire ecosystems have come back to life, biologically diverse and dominated by native species. Ecologists were surprised at how healthy the re-emerging landscape is, despite spending decades underwater.

The Bureau of Reclamation has been studying possible changes to Glen Canyon Dam, including drilling tunnels at or near river level that would allow Lake Powell to be drained if necessary. Until these changes are made, however, the threat of a crisis – caused in part by current dam construction – remains as real as ever. Two consecutive years of severe drought, like we have experienced several times since 2000, would shut down hydroelectric production at the dam and bring us dangerously close to Deadpool.

Allowing the Colorado River to flow freely through Glen Canyon was a radical idea in the 1990s, but today the opposite is true. Climate change and the Southwest’s continued demand for water have shown us that Glen Canyon Dam is not a boon to water users, but part of the problem. A dam change would give water managers more flexibility in dry years and allow Glen Canyon to continue its ecological rebirth. Since the reconstruction of the dam would probably take several years, there is no time to waste.

Today’s extremists deny climate change and assume that Lake Powell will soon fill up again. In a rapidly warming world, “business as usual” should be considered marginal.