Dam Solutions: Efforts to Restore the River

The damming and diverting of the Colorado, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but the advantages of dams are quite obvious, "They supply hydropower that has fueled the growth of urban centers from Seattle to Shanghai, facilitated agriculture and enabled water storage for a plethora of other uses." (Minard) But the question arises of whether the benefits outweigh the costs in the long run. Efforts to turn back time in a sense are being proposed in many cases of major dams. Richard Clayton, a Hydraulic Engineer for the U.S Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado Region said, “We didn’t even consider endangered fish when we built Glen Canyon Dam,” But the dam’s operations have undergone intense scrutiny in recent decades, on behalf of the imperiled ecosystem below the dam. A multimillion-dollar effort to modify flows to help recover the native ecosystem, including several endangered species, has shown mixed success. As part of the solution at Glen Canyon, Clayton also said, “we’re limited in how fast we can ramp up or ramp down releases from the dam [for power generation], and we have a maximum range of fluctuation each day,”. As a result, power generation has been reduced by as much as a third, at a higher cost to power utilities, which so far have managed to avoid rate increases for customers. (Minard)

Photo by Peter McBride

Although some ideas for "solutions" have been put into action, there are even more unavoidable circumstances. "The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. When the Colorado River withdrawals were first allocated among the river basin’s seven states, in 1922, the river held 17.5 million acre-feet (5.7 trillion gallons) of water. However, new science has shown that 1922 was part of an especially wet period. The river now averages about 14.7 million acre-feet per year and is allocated among seven states and Mexico. Water managers are trying to address growing challenges associated with over-allocation, rapidly increasing urban populations, development of unused water rights, and expected climate change. The water levels of the river’s two largest reservoirs—Lake Mead and Lake Powell, stored by Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams—have dropped significantly in recent years, threatening supplies for major cities. In addition, the trapping of silt behind dams also limits the quality and extent of river habitats." (Minard) However, the dam planning process is evolving. What used to be at the hands of bureaucrats, engineers, and economists, has now expanded to include environmentalists and anthropologists. Although solutions to existing dams will not come easily, hopefully the knowledge of existing dams will help to influence the creation of inevitable dams to come.