Daniel Salzler No. 1254 EnviroInsight.org Three Items May 17, 2024
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1.The Colorado River. The mighty Colorado River and it’s tributaries run through seven states and 10 national park sites ( Rocky Mountain and Grand Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument, Currecanti National Recreation Area, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Rainbow Bridge National Monument, and Lake Mead National Recreation Area) providing water and electricity to millions of people, including 30 Native Tribes. Pete McBride documents in his new book, “The Colorado River: Chasing Water” a river that is drying up, and the need to correct course grows more urgent every day.
With little exception, the river and it’s flow continues to shrink and annually, the demand for water grows as the seven states online to grow.
Western cities like Phoenix, Denver, and Las Vegas, the Colorado provides 40 to 90 percent or more of the water that pours out of residents’ faucets. In all it supplies drinking water to 40 million people in the Southwest. The biggest straw sucking water out of the river: agriculture. There are more than four million acres of irrigated farmland in the Colorado River watershed, producing as much as 90 percent of America’s vegetables and greens during the winter months.
In parts of Arizona and in California’s Imperial Valley, I’ve seen farms grow ten to twelve cuttings of alfalfa hay for export to Saudi Arabia or China. That kind of water-management math doesn’t add up.
As they say, water flows uphill to money. Now the Colorado River flows overseas in the form of alfalfa.
In the spring of 2023, after almost a year of bickering and intense negotiations, California, Arizona, and Nevada proposed a landmark deal in which the federal government would pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities, and Native American tribes to use less water through 2026, temporarily reducing consumption by roughly 13 percent in the lower basin. That’s a start, but as Taylor Hawes, the Nature Conservancy’s Colorado River program director, told me, it isn’t enough. “It’s a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid,” she said. “We need to turn our attention and energy to developing long-term plans for the health and sustainability of this river.”Source: Pete McBride book, “The Colorado River: Chasing Water”.
2. Precott Valley Town Council Approves Grant Agreement for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Project: Enhancing Water Conservation Efforts Krista D May 10, 2024 .
Prescott Valley Town Council during its regular meeting Thursday approved a grant agreement with the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona (WIFA) for the Town’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure and Public Outreach Project. The Advanced Metering Infrastructure
Project will add meter transmitters to connect the Town’s remaining 6,000 water meters to Prescott Valley’s WaterSmart Portal.
In 2021, the Town brought the WaterSmart Portal online simultaneously with its new online utility billing service. The WaterSmart Portal at the time was estimated to save the community millions of gallons of water per year. Additionally, the WaterSmart portal provides:
Project will add meter transmitters to connect the Town’s remaining 6,000 water meters to Prescott Valley’s WaterSmart Portal.
In 2021, the Town brought the WaterSmart Portal online simultaneously with its new online utility billing service. The WaterSmart Portal at the time was estimated to save the community millions of gallons of water per year. Additionally, the WaterSmart portal provides:
- State of the art leak detection – customers who set their WaterSmart account for real-time notifications receive alerts if a water leak is detected. The WaterSmart Portal leak detection feature saves water and reduces costs for customers who would typically pay for water leaks.
- Outage and maintenance notices – customers receive immediate alerts when there will be an outage due to repairs or maintenance.
- Customer access to hourly water usage information.
- Historic water use and conservation information – customers can see where their highest usage occurs and receive suggestions for water savings.
- The WaterSmart Customer Portal provides additional tools such as voluntary water conservation strategies and challenges that customers can learn about and implement. The Town applied for the WIFA grant funding in August 2023 to pay for the cost to complete AMI project. The WIFA Board of Directors awarded the grant funding on March 20, 2024.
The WIFA grant money will cover $2,191,381 of the remaining costs to purchase and install the remaining 6,000 SmartPoint® modules on residential meters. It will also cover costs to purchase and install 173 updated large meters for Town commercial accounts. The grant requires the work be completed by June 30, 2026.
Implementation of the remaining AMI project is expected to save an additional 574 acre-feet of water through the 15-year module life, according to calculations provided by Sensus Analytics.
Through the grant, the Town also will expand its efforts to educate the public on water conservation and encourage increased enrollment of customers in the Sensus WaterSmart Customer Portal. The Town will allocate $547,845 in matching funds for this additional project. Source: Prescott Valley Times
3. To Avert Potential Water Crisis, Tunnels May Be Drilled Through Arizona Dam. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will examine the possibility of drilling tunnels through Glen Canyon Dam to ensure water can pass through it at low Lake Powell elevations, two knowledgeable sources told the Arizona Daily Star.
Such a reengineering project will be among several options the bureau will look at to temper new concerns about the ability to deliver Colorado River water through the 61-year-old facility.
The tunnels could prevent a catastrophic occurrence if elevations at Lake Powell ever fall so low that no water could get through the dam to serve farms and Lower Colorado River Basin cities, including Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego.
Some “nonpower” options will also be considered, the sources said. Those would allow water to pass through the dam at low levels but wouldn’t necessarily allow electric power generation at them, unlike other proposals the bureau has already said itwas studying.
Drilling tunnels would amount to a major overhaul in how the dam at the Utah-Arizona border is managed. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell have long been a central pivot point on the Colorado, controlling river flows that otherwise would pass unimpeded to Hoover Dam, cities and farms in the Southwest, the Lower Colorado River and Mexico.
Drilling tunnels would amount to a major overhaul in how the dam at the Utah-Arizona border is managed. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell have long been a central pivot point on the Colorado, controlling river flows that otherwise would pass unimpeded to Hoover Dam, cities and farms in the Southwest, the Lower Colorado River and Mexico.
The dam is also the largest single source of federally subsidized power generated by several Upper Colorado River Basin dams that deliver electricity to 5 million customers in Arizona, Nevada and five other states.
The bureau hasn’t responded to request to confirm the sources’ reports. But the agency is clearly looking more closely at several possible dam fixes for operating at low lake elevations, which it hasn’t identified publicly.
The bureau’s reported willingness to look at tunnels follows a recent disclosure, first reported by the Arizona Daily Star, that the four steel tubes at Glen Canyon Dam through which water would pass at low elevations suffered some damage a year ago when large amounts of water were released through them.
‘Alarming’ This situation is “alarming,” say the two researchers who run the state’s university water research centers, the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal and Arizona State University’s Sarah Porter.
While the damaged outlet tubes don’t represent an imminent threat because the reservoirs are higher today than two years ago, Megdal said she was still concerned the river’s long-term operations were in jeopardy. Both researchers agreed the bureau needs to act reasonably soon in finding solutions.
The bureau’s ability to continue operating the dam in its traditional fashion has been called into question by the last 24 years of declining river flowsbrought on by drought and climate change.
Drilling tunnels into the dam’s abutments — an idea first broached in the late 1990s — would allow water to pass through the 710-foot-tall dam whenever officials want it to.
It could also reduce the risk of major damages to the structure during big floods — such as in June 1983 when floodwaters forced Glen Canyon operators to open giant spillways to avert major damage to the dam and massive flooding downstream.
Some environmental groups have been pushing for such measures for several years now.
But drilling tunnels would also be an expensive proposition, costing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It would require congressional authorization and annual appropriations of large sums of money, and take years to accomplish.
It could also run into opposition from groups or agencies who would prefer the seven Colorado River Basin states to focus more on being prepared to slash water use dramatically, to try to ensure that Lake Powell stays high enough to pass through enough water for the Lower Basin.
Costly damage
This year, federal and Arizona water officials reported that damages to the tubes included cavitation. That involves the formation of vapor bubbles in high-velocity water that can cause mechanical damage, such as erosion of metals and coatings. Sedimentation and pipe thinning also occurred due to the experiments, Arizona and federal officials have acknowledged.
In a late March memo, the bureau said the risks from heavy use of the tubes, commonly known as the outlet works, were serious enough to warrant limits on how much water should flow through the tubes at lower elevations. The memo didn’t specify any other ways of getting water through the dam at lake levels below 3,490 feet, and many water experts have said there are no such alternatives.
If Lake Powell were ever to fall below 3,490 feet — the lowest level at which the dam’s eight turbines generate electricity — the tubes are currently the only way that water could get through the dam.
The outlet tubes could accept water if that were necessary at the lake’s current elevation of 3,560 feet, at which Powell is 34% full and 70 feet above the level at which power generation would stop.
But if the lake were to fall as little as 20 feet from that, the amount of water that could flow through the outlet tubes would be slightly restricted by the bureau’s new limits. If the lake were to fall below 3,490 feet, water released from the tubes would face steeper limits, as much as 17%
The bureau’s current study began at a time of near-crisis for the dam, the lake and the river in general.
In 2022 and early 2023, Powell fell to record low levels. Federal forecasts in fall 2022 showed that under “minimum probable” river flows, Powell could drop below 3,490 feet as early as October 2023 and stay that low for most of the following year. Six months earlier, low river flows caused the Interior Department to abruptly cut annual releases of river water from Powell to Lake Mead by 6%, and to deliver extra water to Powell from the Flaming Gorge reservoir at the Utah-Wyoming border.
Interior officials were concerned at the time about the threat of low water releases to the outlet works, correspondence from the time shows.
But extraordinarily heavy snowpack and high river runoff in 2023 sharply boosted water levels at Powell and Mead. While this year’s runoff is projected at 15% below normal, the two reservoirs remain much higher than two years ago.
In Bryant’s email to the Star, she said, “Current projections show that Lake Powell is not at risk of going below 3,490 feet through 2026, and there is only a 7% risk through water year 2028. Reclamation is already taking actions to prevent Lake Powell from falling below that point including revising near-term operating guidelines for lakes Powell and Mead.”
Damages to the tubes from the 2023 high flow experiments reveal that the dam’s “archaic plumbing” is the most urgent water problem facing the 40 million people of the Colorado River Basin,” said Zach Frankel, the executive director of the Utah Rivers Council, in a recent news release.
“Glen Canyon Dam’s antique plumbing will soon jeopardize the water supply for 30 million people downstream and the Grand Canyon,” said Eric Balken, the executive director of Glen Canyon Institute. “If we drop everything to solve it, the solution will still take 10 years to implement — so why are we procrastinating?”
The idea of drilling tunnels through the dam to let water through was broached in the late 1990s by a former Reclamation director, the late Floyd Dominy, the dam’s biggest booster and a longtime advocate of big water projects in general.
Dominy brought up the idea as a way to let more water through the dam so the natural Glen Canyon area that was flooded by dam construction in the 1960s could later be seen once again. He said he personally didn’t support that idea, but floated it to dam critics as a practical way of carrying out their goal of restoring Glen Canyon. Source: Las Vegas Sun
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