This article was featured in the Daily Prospect newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The Colorado River Basin has a problem: It is severely short of water, particularly in its major reservoirs. Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest and second-largest reservoirs in the country, respectively, reached record lows this week. Powell in particular is at a level of 3,520 feet—just 30 feet above the intakes for its electrical generators.
What is to be done? As I wrote in a previous Prospect print issue, Western water policy is a ludicrous tangle of anachronistic legal precedents and outrageous federal subsidies. Water must be repriced; as my colleague Gabrielle Gurley points out, cattle feed farmers paying $30 an acre-foot (or about 0.009 cents per gallon) while cities pay between $500 and $2,000 per acre-foot is preposterous. That’s half the reason why the shortage has become so bad. Give something extremely valuable away for almost free, and people will waste it.
But any such reform will require a massive legal overhaul, and in the meantime there is a simple and straightforward way to start tackling the problem: Get rid of Lake Powell. Drill some holes in the bottom of that thing and drain ’er dry.
The argument is a simple one. Lake Powell does not directly supply any irrigation system, or any city except Page, Arizona, whose population is just 7,500, and a handful of small Navajo communities. And because it is smack in the middle of a hot, arid desert, and built in a porous sandstone canyon, it loses a tremendous amount of water to evaporation and seepage. It is extremely hard to figure out exactly how much is lost—the lake, when full, has something like 2,000 miles of shoreline—but scientists think it’s in the ballpark of 800,000 acre-feet per year. That’s about equal to New Mexico’s entire legal allotment from the river basin.
In short, water is the most important resource in the Southwest, and Lake Powell is losing literally hundreds of billions of gallons of it per year.
Now, Lake Mead evaporates even more water than Powell—it is smack in the middle of an even hotter and drier desert—but it does provide water to many farms and cities, particularly Las Vegas. Plans are also afoot to try to cut down on evaporation, by such measures as putting up floating solar panels (or “floatovoltaics”) to shade the lake surface. Initiatives like this would be much more effective if the water were consolidated in one big reservoir (Mead) rather than divided between Mead and Powell.
The stated purposes of Powell are to provide water storage, hydroelectric power, and recreation. The first purpose is already irrelevant, because the Colorado River is not nearly big enough to fill the existing storage. As Utah State University professor Jack Schmidt points out, the Colorado has more potential storage on it relative to its size than any river system in all of North America—a huge bucket that is mostly empty. Indeed, the combined levels of Powell and Mead are lower than at any point since 1957—that is, before Glen Canyon Dam was even constructed. Powell’s vast 25 million acre-feet of theoretical capacity is totally pointless, like some toddler wearing a XXXL sweater.
The second two purposes are existentially threatened and almost certainly doomed in the medium term by the water shortage. You can’t generate hydroelectricity, or go water skiing, if there isn’t enough water to fill the lake past some minimum. Already, many recreation facilities on Powell have been either closed indefinitely or moved considerable distances; the river runs right past the old Hite boat ramp, which is maybe ten miles from the lake now.
Indeed, it is critically important to start constructing some drain tunnels as a simple safety precaution. If Powell falls by another 30 feet, its power intakes will be sucking wind; if it falls another 120 feet below that, then so will the river outlet works—the only other way to let water out of the dam.
This “dead pool” level is still some distance above the bottom of the dam, and if it is reached, the water running in from the Upper Colorado and other tributaries might not be able to overcome evaporative losses for months at a time. In that case, the Grand Canyon would dry up and there would be no way to get Mead or the Lower Basin states their legally obligated water. In practice, because of technical problems with the outlet works, the Bureau plans to keep 3,500 feet as the minimum possible pool. Still, a new outlet tunnel at the very bottom of the dam is needed to ensure that Glen Canyon Dam can be bypassed in the pinch.
The Bureau of Reclamation does not project that Powell will hit dead pool anytime soon, but it will likely take years to drill any new outlet tunnels. Better to start on it now (or as soon as we get a non-insane president) just in case.
It would be unfortunate to lose such a large source of zero-carbon electricity and recreation, but all is not lost here either. The Glen Canyon Dam site is one of the sunniest places in the world. The immense grid connection infrastructure currently being used by Powell’s generators, which have a maximum output of 1,320 megawatts, could be adapted to a huge solar-battery farm.
As for recreation, the few who traveled through Glen Canyon before the dam went in, like Edward Abbey or Tad Nichols, testified it was one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Most of the reportedly best parts, like the Crossing of the Fathers, Music Temple, the Cathedral in the Desert, Lower Antelope Canyon, and so on were drowned by the lake.
The journalist Zak Podmore has explored the parts of Glen Canyon that have been exposed by the falling lake, some of which have been dry for decades at this point. Much to his surprise, he found that the natural habitat was recovering remarkably fast. It might not make up economically for the end of fishing and boating on the lake, but a restored Glen Canyon would be guaranteed to become a magnet for boaters, hikers, and sightseers from around the world.
The current plan from the Bureau of Reclamation is to drain water from upstream reservoirs like Flaming Gorge to protect Powell. The priority should be the opposite, and in any case none of those reservoirs are large enough to save Powell over the medium term. At some point, the Colorado Basin states and the federal government are going to face facts whether they like it or not.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify Bureau policy regarding the Lake Powell minimum level.
