Love boating at Lake Powell? There’s a controversial proposal to drain the lake to help with the Colorado River water crisis. City Cast Salt Lake host Ali Vallarta spoke with Luke Runyon, co-director of The Water Desk at the University of Colorado, about the proposal.
Can you explain the relationship between Lake Powell and the Colorado River?
“[The Colorado River’s] headwaters are here in Colorado … high up in Rocky Mountain National Park. The river then flows down through the mountains into Utah. It meets the Green River in Canyonlands National Park. They flow down through Canyonlands and start to enter Lake Powell. Massive dam on Lake Powell, called Glen Canyon Dam, was built in the 1960s. Lake Powell is essentially just a massive bucket of water that was built In order to deliver water further downstream.”
Why is the idea to drain Lake Powell suddenly gaining traction?
“The federal government is going through a process to rethink how we manage the Colorado River. The current guidelines for the river's management were passed in 2007… The federal government has put this charge to the states that rely on the Colorado River to be thinking about how they want to manage this river into the future. In 2007, those guidelines didn't really take into account climate change and this dramatic reduction in water supply.
“[So], you get all sorts of people who come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Here's my dream scenario for the Colorado River's management,’ and that's what you're seeing. This is really giving an opportunity to folks who have been wanting this idea of draining Lake Powell to enter into the conversation.”
What’s the case for draining Lake Powell?
“There have been studies that have looked at evaporation across these two large reservoirs [Lake Powell in Utah and Lake Mead in Nevada], and do you lose less water if you have it all stored in one large reservoir. But I think the argument has been more from the heart … When Lake Powell was built it flooded Glen Canyon. And Glen Canyon was this amazingly beautiful landscape that had tons of wildlife and these little side canyons that come off the Colorado River. It's just as beautiful as the Grand Canyon or Canyonlands National Park, and these environmental advocates say, ‘Why not restore that? Why not bring back that landscape that was essentially drowned underneath Lake Powell for so many decades?’ That's really where a lot of the argument is coming from. Like, this place has a value beyond just water storage.”
