building cities in the desert is stupid.
From Nautil.us, April 4:
I am paddling through the silt of the Green River, the largest, most remote, and least developed tributary of the Colorado River, which brings water to nearly 40 million people across the western United States. It’s crucial, it’s overused, and it’s at risk.
The Green starts in the glaciated high alpine of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, then winds through hundreds of miles of sagebrush flats, scrubby plains, tight gorges, and empty gas lands to the red rock desert of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, where it meets up with the main stem of the Colorado. All signs of western development—from coal to cattle to cities—surround the river. As population swells in cities like Denver and Salt Lake, and as climate change shrinks stream flow, the question of how the water in this river is used and how far it can be stretched is becoming more urgent.
Like nearly all water sources in the western U.S., it’s been dammed up, spread thin, and abused. Drought has wracked most of the western half of the U.S. since the beginning of the 21st century, draining reservoirs and depleting aquifers. Water is mired in the future of the climate, it’s tied to the physical, political, and economic divide between urban areas and rural ones, and it’s crucial to the debate about future energy sources. And more than anything, it’s indispensable. More than oil. More than food.
I’m paddling downstream into the pooled up water of Fontenelle Reservoir, formed by the first dam on the river, one of two major storage sites on the Green. My pack raft is about as long as I am tall. I paddle it with an old, chipped kayak paddle, bought in the days before I realized I was too nervous to be any good at whitewater kayaking. The little raft feels slightly more stable than a kayak and is easier to wrangle than a canoe or a full-sized raft, but it’s easily deflected by wind, and it feels flimsy sometimes when I’m alone.
I’m particularly curious about Fontenelle because I want to know more about how dams changed the dynamic of the river. Coming into the trip, I knew enough about reservoirs, dams, and storage to think about them as a necessary evil: manmade breaks in the ecosystem to be worked around and reckoned with. I had the view that dams were, for the most part, bad, environmentally destructive, and stupid, and that they should be removed wherever possible. But I’ve been on the river for two weeks now, and the more I talk to people who touch the water every day, the more I realize how naïve and unsubtle my thinking has been.
How the West Was Won
In the morning, I cold-call Kirk Jensen, who runs the Fontenelle Dam and Power Plant, to ask if I can see the inside of the dam. “Is now good?” he says. “We’ll open the gates for you.”
Fontenelle is a utilitarian dam. It has square corners and lacks any kind of architectural grace. When Jensen walks me inside, I get the feeling that a random visitor is a rare occurrence. He leads me into the narrow, humming control room, which is lined on both sides with analog dials and switches. It feels like we’re inside a submarine, monitoring water pressure below the surface.
I follow him down a set of skinny stairs to look at the guts of the power plant. Fontenelle has a single Francis-style turbine, a kind he says is often used on rivers with large flows and dams with steep drops. The turbine creates a small amount of power—10,000 kilowatts—but Fontenelle mainly operates to store and supply water and to keep its reservoir, and Flaming Gorge Reservoir downstream, at certain levels. The amount of water pushed through the dam is based on river flow and demand downstream.
The general public doesn’t know what the dams do.
They’d be at the mercy of the rivers without them.
They’d be at the mercy of the rivers without them.
The Seedskadee Project, the official name of the Fontenelle Dam construction project, was authorized under the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Storage Project Act of 1956. The bureau, an agency in the U.S. Department of Interior, provided jobs in the wake of the Great Depression, and it did what it set out to do: It provided a large-scale plumbing system for expanding agriculture and growing cities. The bureau has long defended its dams and reservoirs because they provide agricultural, household, and industrial water to about one-third of the population of the American West, and that’s true. We’ve staked life in desert cities on their ability to deliver water steadily. Water storage is a big part of the reason people can live in areas where it doesn’t rain.Allocate more than is available? That's stupidity squared.
The Colorado River Storage Project Act initiated construction of a number of large dams, including Glen Canyon and Flaming Gorge as well as Fontenelle, with the intent to manage and mitigate risk in the upper Colorado River and to control flows between the Upper and Lower Basins. By the time Fontenelle was built in 1963, it had already become clear that there was less water in the river than was allocated in the Colorado River Compact....MORE
Previously:
Water Focused Hedge Funds: Liquid Assets or H2OhNo?
A Look At A Second Water Focused Hedge Fund
It's So Hard to Find a Decent Bet on Water (investment vehicles)
A Short History Of Las Vegas And Water
I am one sick human being.UPDATED--"Las Vegas about to run out of water, go ‘out of business’"
My first thought on seeing "The Las Vegas Land and Water Company" was to inquire whether the company had any outstanding bonds with weird covenants and/or gold backing. I kid you not. Obsessive, Moi?
Clock is Ticking on Las Vegas' Water Supply and The Elvis Portfolio
"Water Crisis: Lake Mead, Largest US Reservoir, Faces Federal 'Water Emergency,' Forced Rationing"
February 2009
Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights
The Las Vegas metro population is approximately two million.
Building cities in the desert is stupid.
The extent of the arid region is even larger than this map portrays (from DesertUSA):
