Re: Lake Powell
The dam will never be rebuilt and the dam itself will be there forever. One day, millions of years from now when aliens are inspecting the shell of a planet we have left, Glen Canyon dam will be a giant shining monolith in the midst of an entropic wasteland. <br /><br />Glen Canyon dam is a gravity dam meaning, it is so big and heavy, it will hold back Lake Powell even if it were not pinned into the walls of the canyon. Concrete was poured 24 hours a day for 12 years to complete the dam. It was finished in 1963 and the lake did not fill for 18 years. The canyon walls are Navajo Sandstone and they soaked up the water like a sponge. Do you know what happens when sandstone is immersed in water? It turns back into sand, and this is what is happening where the dam is pinned into the canyon wall. Divers who check the dam periodically report that they can pull out chunks of soft crumbling rock with their hands around the dam. Nearly 3000 cubic feet per second of water are now leaking between the dam and the canyon walls. <br /><br />The Glen Canyon project is a Bureau of wreck the nation, I mean reclamation, colossal blunder. They nearly lost the dam in 1983 when a 100 year flood came roaring down from the Rockies in excess of 100,000 cfs. The lake was rising at a rate of 1 vertical foot per day despite the fact that they were releasing the maximum amount of water possible through the penstocks and the diversion tunnels. Remember this lake holds 27 million acre feet of water and is 186 miles long. A visitor taking a tour of the dam looked on the downstream side where the water was coming out of one of the two diversion tunnels and noticed that the water had started to turn red. Then chunks of concrete and re-bar started flying out into the water. The dam was failing. They had to shut down the diversion tunnel while the flood continued. To prevent the lake from spilling over the top of the dam the BOR constructed an 8 foot plywood fence at the top rim of the dam. The flood subsided when the water was within 3 inches of the top of the plywood. Disaster averted, que singing angels. If the dam were to fail, so too would Hoover, which holds Lake Mead, Mojave, Parker, Davis, etc... Most of the southern California valleys, southwestern Arizona and the southern tip of Nevada would have to be evacuated. This is to say nothing of the fact that the entire southwestern water supply just flowed into the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez taking every structure it encountered with it. The entire region would be a wasteland and nearly uninhabitable. Thanks Floyd! <br /><br />Ironically, lake Powell was named in honor of, or perhaps to "spite" John Wesley Powell, the first man to run the Colorado river through Grand Canyon in 1869. Powell detested the thought of managing the river in this fashion and tried to convince the federal government that the West could not be colonized en mass because there was not enough water. Lo and behold 130 years later and the West is locked in the worst draught this area has ever seen in recorded history. "Major" Powell is rolling his eyes from the grave. His epitaph should have read "I told you so."<br /><br />One day in the maybe not so distant future, the govenment's irresponsible mismanagement of the southwestern United States' water supply will herald a disaster. And the insanity continues. Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles use more water than any other cities in the country. They water their lawns, fill their pools, dam water in gigantic reservoirs where evaporation takes 12 times as much water as they get from rainfall. The list goes on, and yet sprawl remains un-checked. Artesian springs charged in the Pliestocene era that used to flow steadily in the Phoenix valley have long since dried up. The city of Phoenix mines groundwater so heavilly that some areas of the city have actually lost elevation. Las Vegas city code says that you can only have so much grass in your yard to water and at the same time they allow one subdivision after the other to be built with thousands of new lawns to water. Los Angeles is sucking southern California dry. What's next LA? The Columbia? The Yukon? You better get busy! <br /><br />The dam should never have been built in the first place and one day nature will take back the Colorado one way or the other. <br /><br />Hayduke Lives!
