Dam Problems: The Colorado Case Study

        The vast majority (about 90%) of the Colorado River comes from snowpack, high in the Rocky Mountains, and then travels south nearly 1,500 miles through deserts and canyons to wetlands of a huge delta in Mexico and then into the Gulf of California. Or at least it used to for millions of years. “…beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting flow hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, Sand Diego, Phoenix and other fast growing cities.” (Zielinski) Today not a drop of the Colorado River reaches the Gulf of California.

"The battle over dams is at the core of worldwide conflicts involving water scarcity, environmental degradation, globalization, social justice, and the growing gap between rich and poor."- Jacques Leslie


Socioeconomic Degradation

            Although the conflict of dams is a global problem, the Southwest region has a very local example of just how degrading their effects can be. By looking at the over-damming(The Colorado River supports over 20 dams) of the Colorado River, especially the Hoover and the Glen Canyon dam, we can see exactly how the dams came to be and why they are now such a problem.  


How the dams along the Colorado River came to be is a large part of Southwestern environmental history. The first of the major dams, the Hoover Dam, especially shaped history along with the environment in several ways. The timing of its construction in 1936 was a large part of recovering from the depression, but not at the cost of the people or the environment. Jacques Leslie satirically wrote when speaking of removing the Hoover Dam;   "Take it away, and you remove a slice of American history, including a piece of the recovery from the Depression, when news of each step in the dam's construction- the drilling of the diversion tunnels, the building of the earth-and-rock cofferdams, the digging to bedrock, the first pour of foundation, the accretion of five-feet-high cement terraces that eventually formed the face- heartened hungry and dejected people across the country. And take away the jobs the dam provided ten or fifteen thousand workers, whose desperation compelled them to accept risky, exhausting labor for four dollars a day- more than 200 workers died during Hoover's construction."

         The global problems of dams consist of the displacement of people, loss of ecosystems and even spiritual places. In the case of the Colorado, the loss of these things is not always direct. The loss of people along the Colorado was indirect due to the location of the dams mostly in low populated deserts unlike The Three Gorges Dam. The case of the Colorado does however have a very direct impact on the creation of cities in what would other wise not exist. Even now, Hoover Dam provides 90 percent of Las Vegas' water, “turning a desert outpost into the fastest-growing metropolis in the country”. The Hoover Dam not only brought a great misallocation of resources (water and hydroelectric power) but also encouraged the many new dams that followed on the Colorado, such as the Glen Canyon, Davis, Parker, Headgate Rock, Palo Verde, and more all the way to the Morelos and across the Mexican border. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland. John Waterman describes what it was like in his first hand account of traveling along the Colorado River to come to find the diminishing flow of where it once traveled. "I splashed out in bare feet, worried that our most iconic white water river would make me physically ill. My companion, Pete McBride, stayed clean by climbing out through the tamarisk trees. We tried to wipe the river shit off our pack rafts with tamarisk fronds, cursing the system that has diminished the Mighty Colorado to a stinking cesspool." 

The dams also destroyed part of the spiritual and cultural lives of the Cocopa Indians. This tribe faced faced cultural extinction because they fished and farmed the Delta for more than a millennium prior to the dam. Downstream fishermen and farmers also their lives and livelihoods altered or even destroyed by dams, many of them poor people who found it hard to adapt. (Minard) Before the construction of the dam, the river carried nutrients necessary to fuel fisheries and marine life to the Gulf of California. (Leslie) Not a drop of the Colorado River reaches the Gulf of California today. Besides the loss to the indigenous peoples, the river also obscured inscriptions by Everett Reuss along the walls of the Glen Canyon. (Sleight)

Ecological Degradation

         The environmental and ecological damages of dams are also overwhelming. The several dams in the desert southwest change the nature of the river ecosystem. The Glen Canyon Dam for example was an originally warm, sediment-filled, muddy river, which now runs cold and clear, significantly impacting downstream ecosystems. “Over night in March 1963, as Lake Powell began filling, Glen Canyon Dam refrigerated and cleared the Grand Canyon's river of sediment. This flipped on a floodlight into an ecosystem that spent the last five million years adapting to the dark.” (Waterman) Three species have already become extinct in the Grand Canyon and many others have become endangered throughout the river: the Humpback chub, and razorback sucker, whose populations are monitored by tags implanted by marine biologists.

Photo by Peter McBride

On the stretch of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon National Park, Glen Canyon Dam has starved beaches of silt, and turned historically rough, sediment-rich water into a clear, cold flow that has been fatal to native fish but favorable to nonnative trout. “Native vegetation was giving way to invasive tamarisk trees (which use a much greater amount of water than the native plant species), and endangered fish teetered on the brink of extinction before activist groups and federal biologists began to try turning back the clock.” (Minard)

 Another huge problem is the loss of water along the river and throughout the reservoirs. “The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.” (Zielinski) And According to John Waterman in his National Geographic article, in the case of the Hoover Dam, if the ongoing drought lowers the reservoir another 50 feet (currently down more than 125 feet), the hydroelectric turbines will be inoperable. Peter McBride who spent many year photographing the Colorado River recalls, “It’s sad to see the mighty Colorado River come to a dribble and end some 50 miles north of the sea.”

Photo by Peter McBride