WATER POLITICS

In 1998, when I was in fourth grade, I joined a class field trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. But when we got to Cortez, the road was barricaded. Hours earlier, three men had stolen a water-tanker truck and killed a police officer before fleeing into the desert. 

In his book Dead Run, writer Dan Schultz makes the case that the criminals were inspired by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The men were survivalists planning to turn the water truck into a mobile bomb, Schultz says. Their probable goal: To pack the tanker truck with explosives and blowup Glen Canyon Dam. 

Back then, the idea of draining Lake Powell was a fringe idea, attractive to anti-government extremists and radical environmentalists. Those who advocated a legal decommissioning of the Glen Canyon Dam, including supporters of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, were often laughed out of the room. 

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In those years, the dam was working as intended. Lake Powell was nearly full in the late ‘90s. Hydropower production was going full tilt, and millions of people were visiting the reservoir annually to fish, houseboat, and water ski. 

But since the year 2000, Lake Powell has been in decline. Climate change has reduced runoff throughout the Colorado River Basin by around 20% compared to the previous century. In 2022, the reservoir—the second-largest in the country after Lake Mead—was less than a quarter full.

Nearly every boat ramp on Lake Powell was unusable last spring, and there was barely enough water to sustain hydroelectric generation. One more bad snow year would have pushed the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse, dropping the reservoir’s surface toward the lowest outlets on the Glen Canyon Dam—a point known as “dead pool.” 

At dead pool, the 27 million people who rely on Colorado River water downstream from the dam would likely be forced to reduce water use quickly and involuntarily. 

But Lake Powell would still stretch 100 miles into Glen Canyon at dead pool. 

That’s because there is a significant design flaw in the dam: There is no drain at the bottom. Billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the dead-pool reservoir with no easy way to release them into the Grand Canyon. 

Luckily, that catastrophic scenario didn’t play out in 2023 thanks to a near-record snow year that brought Lake Powell to around 40% full. After another decent runoff this spring, the reservoir level held steady.

Twenty-four years of low levels in Lake Powell haven’t been all bad, either. Over 100,000 acres of land that were once flooded had been exposed by early 2023, including countless cultural sites sacred to Indigenous people. Along Glen Canyon’s tributaries, whole ecosystems have sprung back to life, biologically diverse and dominated by native species. Ecologists have been surprised by just how healthy the reemerging landscape is, despite spending decades underwater. 

The Bureau of Reclamation has been studying potential modifications to the Glen Canyon Dam, including the drilling of tunnels at or near river level that would allow Lake Powell to be emptied if necessary. Until those modifications are made, however, the potential for a crisis—caused in part by the current dam design—remains as real as ever. Two back-to-back years of severe drought, such as we’ve seen several times since 2000, would halt hydropower production at the dam and bring us dangerously close to dead pool.

Allowing the Colorado River to flow freely through Glen Canyon was a radical idea in the 1990s, but the opposite is true today. Climate change and steady water demand in the Southwest have shown us that the Glen Canyon Dam, instead of being a boon to water users, is part of the problem. Modifying the dam would give water managers greater flexibility in dry years, and it would allow Glen Canyon to continue its ecological rebirth. Since dam modifications would likely take several years to complete, there is no time to waste. 

The extremists today are those who deny climate change, assuming that Lake Powell will refill again soon. In a rapidly warming world, business as usual should be treated as the fringe position.