Glen Canyon Dam faces deadpool

By Zak Podmore

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.

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.

Zak Podmore is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively debate about Western issues. He is a Utah-based journalist and the author of Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, published by Torrey House Press in August.

This column was published in the following newspapers:

10/01/2024 Coyote Gulch Denver CO
10/01/2024 Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Grand Junction CO
10/01/2024 Denver Post Denver CO
10/01/2024 The Landdesk Durango co
10/01/2024 Vail Daily Vail CO
10/01/2024 Whitehall Ledger Whitehall MT
10/01/2024 Moab Times Independent Moab UT
10/02/2024 Montrose Daily Press Montrose CO
10/02/2024 Jackson Hole News & Guide Jackson Hole WY
10/02/2024 Aspen Daily News Aspen CO
10/03/2024 Idaho Mountain Express Ketchum ID
10/04/2024 Laramie Boomerang Laramie WY
10/04/2024 Salt Lake Tribune Salt Lake City UT
10/04/2024 Mineral County Miner Monte Vista CO
10/04/2024 Center Post Dispatch Center CO
10/04/2024 South Fork Tines South Fork CO
10/04/2024 Alamosa Valley Courier Alamosa CO
10/03/2024 Taos News Taos NM
10/03/2024 Lake Powell Chronicle Page AZ
10/03/2024 Moab Sun Moab UT
10/03/2024 Del Norte Prospector Del Norte CO
10/05/2024 Conejos County Citizen Monte Vista CO
10/03/2024 Durango Telegraph Durango CO
10/10/2024 High Country Shopper Paonia CO
10/17/2024 Sierra Nevada Ally Carson City NV
10/17/2024 KVNF Radio Paonia CO
10/19/2024 Cochise County Herald Review Cochise County AZ
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John Wesley
2 months ago

Until the Bureau of Reclamation reconciles huge water releases for seemingly tertiary things like distributing sediment and cooling river temps for specific fish, it’s kinda hard to sit there and not wonder if the people in charge are inventing ways to maintain crisis levels.

Glen Canyon Dam faces deadpool — Zak Podmore (WritersOnTheRange.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification – Coyote Gulch
2 months ago

[…] the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Zak […]

Sally Jones
2 months ago

It says above that your purpose is to strike up a lively debate. Well, here it is. Lake Powell is nowhere near dead pool. In fact, it is 200 feet above. Even at its lowest, it was 150 feet above. I share your concern about the silting of the Lake, but there are strategies to overcome that which the authorities should employ more frequently. I’m also concerned about the invasive flora around the shore of the lake. This, too, is a daunting task, but one that can be tackled. We’ve worked several weeks on shore clean up, especially interesting when the Lake is low. We also were at Lake Powell at its lowest level in 1998 with friends touring the Lake. Still absolutely lovely.

A lot of the Colorado River’s issues sit firmly on the shoulders of political interests. Do you know how much Denver (where I live) takes out of the system via tunnels daily? All bought and paid for nearly a century ago when Denver was really a cow town, not the urban mess it is today.

And, yes, tearing down Glen Canyon dam is STILL a loony, fringe idea. That said, you have a right to your opinion.

I’ve wondered about a google search of all sites on the internet asking for the effects of “climate change” on the environment. That, too, would be a daunting task. It seems to me that weather conditions change, and when they do the climate change advocates are quick to label it climate, rather than weather when it is advantageous to their beliefs. And the opposite is true as well. Quite literally I believe that everything will be blamed on climate change, no exceptions including the 25 pounds I can’t seem to lose. A good example of that is those who say Denver is becoming a desert. Yes, Denver is exploding, and water availability is spread among a lot more people, but NOAA statistics contradict that belief. But once the loony idea is out there, there’s no holds barred.

Becca Lawton
2 months ago

Excellent summary of a complicated issue. Worldwide, dams are failing to deliver the benefits they either once did or never could. Thank you, Zak, for taking a close look at Glen Canyon in this time of change.

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