In the drying West, dams are no longer the answer
George Miller
Thursday, January 8, 2009
In the 1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began planning a reservoir on the American River, hoping it would become a major element ofCalifornia's extensive system of dams and canals that ships water across the state. The bureau studied the proposal, to be called Auburn Dam, for decades only to find the dam would cost $10 billion to construct - if it ever survived environmental review and if earthquakes didn't render the site useless in the interim. This fall, the State of California finally revoked the federal government's unused water right for the project. Ultimately, the Bureau of Reclamation spent more than 40 years and $300 million studying a dam that would never be built and would never deliver a drop of water.
The Auburn Dam boondoggle is not an outlier. The Bureau of Reclamation is a billion-dollar-a-year water management agency created for a different era, when our nation had different needs. Enormous water infrastructure projects like dams and reservoirs once drove agricultural and urban development, but no longer. Today, the serious water challenges facing the American West have been exacerbated by climate change, and the largest water manager in the country hasn't adapted. The Bureau of Reclamation has constantly convinced themselves that building one more big dam - or one more canal - would finally solve our water problems.
In some cases, reservoirs help to meet our new water needs, but such expensive and time-consuming projects only make sense in the context of an agency that follows the science and the law, is a wise steward of the resource, and promotes cost-effective solutions. It's hard to say that the Bureau of Reclamation is that agency, and to remain relevant in the coming years the agency will have to reinvent itself.
President-elect Barack Obama has articulated a clear and compelling vision of a government that, in sharp contrast to the last eight years, addresses real-world problems. As he said last month, "This isn't about big government or small government. It's about building a smarter government that focuses on what works."
Smart government, when it comes to supplying water to cities, farms and the environment in the 21st century, will mean leaving behind the dam-building and pipeline-laying federal bureaucracy of the last hundred years. If we put our money into proven and cost-effective strategies like groundwater cleanup and better coordination between reservoirs, then we can dramatically improve the reliability of our existing clean water supplies without wasting time and energy chasing the cumbersome and expensive infrastructure dreams of the past century.
Instead of spending time and money we can't afford to study dams that will never be built, the federal government should work with local water managers who have cost-effective plans to stretch their existing water supplies. In the city of Pittsburg, in my congressional district, and in other parts of the Bay Area, for example, water managers are actively pursuing alternative water supplies through water recycling, where wastewater is treated and the clean result is reused for commercial irrigation and industrial processes. This allows us to add water to the system - quickly, reliably and without causing environmental damage or depending on increasingly unreliable snowpack. Congress authorized the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Recycling Program last year, which will pump nearly $30 million in federal seed money into the system that will be matched many times over by local entities. Congress will be pursuing similar efforts in the years to come.
Under the Bush administration, the Bureau of Reclamation fought these proposals every step of the way.
Federal agencies also need to do much more to help businesses, farms and cities adjust to a new, more water-constrained future by becoming more efficient. California has already proved it can rise to such a challenge with energy use: We use 40 percent less electricity per capita than the national average, and a recent UC Berkeley study found that our investments in energy efficiency have created more than a million jobs while saving Californians $56 billion in energy costs. We can take that model and apply it to our world of water.
Significantly improving the water-use efficiency of major appliances and fixtures could save billions of gallons of water per day, yet today there are no tax incentives targeted specifically at water conservation. Expanded federal incentives, improved research and development, and stronger federal efficiency requirements can help us reduce our reliance on dwindling or unstable water supplies, while driving innovation, saving money and adding to the economy.
Now is the time to have a serious conversation about whether we will still need a $1 billion-a-year federal dam construction and water management agency in the 21st century. The president-elect and his team clearly understand the challenges posed by a warming and more variable climate, and they recognize that a smarter government can help America meet its challenges. It's time to insist that an old bureaucracy learn new tricks so that we can meet our clean water needs without breaking the bank or wreaking havoc on our natural waterways.
Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, is a member of the House Democratic Leadership and the former chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/08/EDU91559QS.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Mulroy issues harsh predictions on global warming
Jan. 12, 2009
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - Southern Nevada's top water official warned federal policymakers today that they underestimate climate change at their own risk as they consider ways to bolster the nation's infrastructure
"We need to understand where the floods are going to occur and where the drought conditions are going to be protracted before we start making long-term investments," said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority
In the short term, fixing long-neglected bridges, roads and water and sewer systems is fine, Mulroy said. But beyond that, she said, "We need to look at (infrastructure) through a 21st century lens in a very different climate and not take a 19th century climate and assume that is going to be the norm."
"We have not spent any time in this country investing in the science of climate change in any kind of concerted action," she said. "We have not spent time talking about how we are going to adapt."
Mulroy, who directs the agency that supplies most of the water in Clark County, sounded the alarm as part of a panel assembled by the Brookings Institution to discuss infrastructure and recommendations for President-elect Barack Obama to pursue in his economic stimulus strategy and beyond.
Investments in infrastructure create jobs as well as shore up the physical foundations of the nation, but panelists said the ways such projects are weighed and funded are grossly inefficient.
The audience of several hundred at the think tank grew silent at Mulroy's striking predictions. She said Southern California "is very much facing the real possibility of having a major water crisis in 2010," and that three more years of drought along the Colorado River will cost Southern Nevada 40 percent of its water supply.
"Two more years after that, we lose 90 percent of our water supply," if the drought persists over the longer period, she said, referring Lake Mead levels dropping beneath the intake pipes that draw water for municipal use.
Professional water managers recognize climate change "could destroy the very underpinnings of every economy of the United States, whether it is dikes that are going to break from rising ocean levels to whether it is wastewater or water treatment plants that are situated on the banks of rivers that can be flooded out, to if it is in the West from the most dire and desperate drought that we have ever experienced."
Mulroy said she was hopeful at the appointment of former EPA administrator Carol Browner to become the global warming coordinator in the Obama White House. While federal science agencies now compete for climate change funding, there might be some coordination in the new administration.
"Once that science gets going and we get a better understanding of the true impacts of climate change, then we can look at the most at-risk situations, whether it is the dikes in California, whether it is the potential of losing a significant part of Florida, whether it is the protracted droughts that are gong to wipe out whole economies, and what are the possible solutions," she said.
Policymakers will need to become creative, even "outrageous," Mulroy said. For instance, she suggested that floodwaters from the Mississippi River might be diverted west for drought prevention.
"Why can't floodwaters in one part of the country, through a series of exchanges, be a water supply in another part of the country?" she said. "I could show you a series of exchanges between the Mississippi and California and you could start fixing some problems.
"When it comes to watersheds and water supplies, we are all interconnected," she said.
Contact Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/37468904.html
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The ghosts of a long-lost natural wonder.
A documentary featured in this weekends MOUNTAINFILM Festival, Let the River Run, depicts how the once-magical Glen Canyon appeared before the dam, and the flooding of Lake Powell, stole it away.
Telluride Times-Journal
By Douglas McDaniel
May 17-23, 1998
When you look at the film of the way Glen Canyon used to be - before the dam that created Lake Powell, two images fill the mind. You see the grandeur of the pristine canyon as it once was, as well as the desert sea it is today.
It was 1963, a tidal year in America, when David Brower of the Sierra Club brought a 16-mm camera into the little known canyon along the Colorado River, north of the more famous Grand Canyon. In the spring before the loss of John F. Kennedy to history, a year before the Beatles hit these shores, the spring snowmelt was slowly rising in the gorge and glorious side canyons of Glen Canyon.
Brower's film footage, used in a new documentary to be featured in the MOUNTAINFILM Festival, is one last glimpse of a canyon that, seemingly, is vanished forever beneath the flood of Lake Powell.
Seemingly because, if Let The River Run: A Journey Into Glen Canyon is about anything, it's about seeing the canyon again, its narrow gorges, secret riparian places, its steep and ancient walls. It raises the issue: What if they drained the dam? What would we see, what would it be to restore the canyon like some long lost art treasure on a world scale? As the title Let the River Run suggests, the film, a documentary funded by the Glen Canyon Institute, supports the idea of draining the dam so that the river can run free again, and the canyon can be revealed for future generations.
In the generations that have come since the original Glen Canyon Dam was built, the public's sense of the place is to capture water for the growing metropoli of the New West, generate hydroelectric power and to create a spacious playground for houseboats and water skiers. But that is only the past 35 years of a canyon that had previously endured for eons. Shortly before the flood, the canyon was just as John Wesley Powell had seen it for the first time in 1869. When Powell's men explored it in rickety wood boats stocked with supplies for a harrowing three-month trip, Glen Canyon proved to be a respite after his expedition encountered terrifying rapids in Cataract Canyon. He found the more gently flowing section of the Colorado River to be one of the most sublime places in creation. He wrote:
"On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed. So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments ...
"Past these towering monuments, past these rounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak-set glens, past these fern- decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, as our attention is arrested by some new wonder."
It remained that way until the late 1950s, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill to flood the upper basin of the Colorado River to generate electricity to subsidize irrigated agriculture in the region. Looking back on it now, most conservationists and environmentalists believe it didn't have to happen, that if more political pressure had been applied, the costly dam project could have been scuttled.
But in the end, Glen Canyon was sacrificed to save another natural area. Brower always regretted his pragmatic compromise as the director of the Sierra Club in the 1950s.
In 1963, Brower took his 16-mm camera into the canyon not knowing what he would find. They are among the last pictures ever taken of this natural wonder. And one can only imagine his sense of loss as he peered through the lens, seeing the water in the dam rise, knowing he had a part to play in the tragedy for a place that he had only begun to appreciate as a scenic wonder.
"He realized what an amazing place it was, but it was too late," said the film's director, Lili Schad, from her Clearwater Films studio in Half Moon Bay, Calif. "He realized it was the biggest mistake of his life. Literally, he goes down that this compromise was going to flood one of the most beautiful places on earth." The political decisions to acquiesce to the dam project started out in the 1950s as a defense of the rich sandstone wilderness near Dinosaur National Monument. The supporters of the Colorado River Storage Project were faced with strong opposition with the conservationist movement led by Brower's Sierra Club, The project's supporters had come to realize that opposition to dam Echo Park near Dinosaur National Monument on the upper basin would cause the destruction of their plans to dam all of that portion of the Colorado. The environmental movement as led by the Sierra Club had successfully convinced Interior Secretary Douglas "Give-way" McKay to abandon the Echo Park idea if the conservationists wouldn't oppose the other elements of the project. But as the conservationists were celebrating the salvation of Dinosaur, others were saying Glen Canyon was being given up too easily. Those few people who had seen the park were claiming the area was at least equally, but probably more significant.
But in the end, the organizations let Glen be sacrificed in order to save Dinosaur and Echo Park. In the days since the compromise was made in the 1950s, those involved in the movement now regard the decision with regret.
"Glen Canyon died in 1963 and I was partly responsible for its needless death," wrote Brower. "Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure. When we began to find out it was too late. On January 21, 1963, the last day on which the execution of one of the planet's greatest scenic antiquities could yet have been stayed, the man who theoretically had the power to save this place (Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall) did not pick up a telephone and give the necessary order. I was within a few feet of his desk in Washington that day and witnessed how the forces long at work finally had their way. So a steel gate dropped, choking off the flow in the canyon's cartoid artery, and from that moment the canyon's life force ebbed quickly. A huge reservoir, absolutely not needed in this century, almost certainly not needed in the next, and conceivably never to be needed at all, began to fill."
Adding to the sense of haunting and intrigue of Let the River Run is the way the 20-minute film came together. After it was shot; Brower's footage was stowed away for more than 30 years, forgotten in a vault. Brower never went back to it again, Glen Canyon being one of the sorriest and saddest moments of his career. According to a member of the organization that funded the film, Denise Boggs, director of the Glen Canyon Institute, "It was sitting in the basement of the old Sierra Club Office in San Francisco. When they were cleaning it out they found the film."
Boggs' response to seeing the footage, in vaulted storage for more than 30 years, was one of mixed emotions. It was like looking at some lost world.
"It broke my heart," she said. "I cannot believe this place was taken from my generation."
Not only her generation. For example, Katie Lee remembers it well. A 1950's folksinger and Hollywood actress who learned to run the river - one of the first women to ever do so - Lee said the damming of Glen Canyon changed her life.
"This place was my refuge. It was my place of healing," said the 85-year-old Lee, who currently resides in Jerome, Ariz., where she has just written a book, All My Rivers Are Gone, on her river-running exploits in Glen Canyon and the rest of the Colorado and its tributaries. "It was a place of incredible beauty. They just killed my love. That's what they did. It used to be so overpowering. I used to put my hands on these immense stone walls and I could feel the power of the storms than had hewn them down for a millennium."
The lyrical, poetic voice of Lee, a once-famous singer and writer of old Colorado River folk tunes, is used frequently as a background voice for Let the River Run. A river runner between the years of 1954 to 1963, one of the things she remembers most about Glen were the side canyons with cathedral ceilings, and the way the light, in these separate, magical worlds, changed during the day. In the film, she says, "It was different than any other light I have ever seen. It was not a light that you saw. You felt it."
Lee was a good choice to describe the footage in Let the River Run, especially since she was the one responsible for naming many of the side canyons still currently on the map. In the 1950s she had submitted names of locales to the U.S.G.S., conjuring evocative geographic names like Dangling Rope, Dungeon, Balanced Rock Canyon, Grotto Canyon and Little Arch Canyon.
When the dam closed the water flow in 1963, Lee refused to ride the river. But she couldn't stay away. Two years later, she put in again at a place called Hall's Crossing. But the experience of seeing how her healing place had been flooded was too devastating to bear. "I just about died," she said. "Everything was so changed, so altered, and so sickening to me. I went into a deep depression."
Lee never went into a canyon, or any river at all, for a decade. As Glen Canyon Dam created a lake extending more than 200 miles from Page, Ariz. into the canyon lands of Utah, she found and learned other names for her lost place. "Cess Powell, the cesspool of the Colorado River," she says bitterly. "Major Powell would have rolled over in his grave if he'd seen that mess."
Lee says she won't return to "Lake Foul" until the dam is removed and the lake is drained. This has long been a dream of environmentalists, especially radical environmentalists. The opening scene of the Edward Abbey novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, imagines a group of marauding activists bent on destroying the dam. "Blow up Glen Canyon Dam," Abbey used to say at speeches and gatherings.
But Lee, a good friend of the late writer, believes the social environment has changed now, and awareness of what Glen Canyon used to be is leading to something positive.
"We have given up that 'Monkey Wrench' scene. That was a kid's scene," she says. "We can do it politically now."
The Glen Canyon Institute, a three-year-old organization formed by Dr. Richard Ingebretsen, a University of Utah professor of physics and medical doctor, is trying to make a case for decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. Boggs, the institute's director, says the original reasons for the dam's construction are no longer valid.
"You can shut off the dam today and nobody would notice a flicker in of their lights," she says. "It loses money, and more importantly, water, due to evaporation. The amount of water that evaporates every year is enough to supply Salt Lake City for four years."
Of course, the opposition to such an idea is still strong, especially from a Utah congressional representation that's supportive of the recreational uses of Lake Powell. Nevertheless, the decommissioning concept, after years of being ridiculed, is gaining acceptance at a grass roots level.
"It really isn't a hair-brained scheme," Boggs said. "There is biological, scientific and economic information to show how this area can be restored."
But short of that, Katie Lee, the crooner of canyon songs, has another solution.
"I think Mother Nature's going through menopause, and man, she's pissed," Lee says. "I think she's going to do a number on Glen Canyon Dam pretty soon."
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