![]() ![]() ![]() Lake Mead, like Lake Powell, is at but 30 percent or so of capacity and suffers from over-allocation of Colorado River water. Then, all bets are off.įarther downstream is the largest human-made reservoir, by volume, in the United States, Lake Mead, created by the older Hoover Dam, also on the Colorado, upon which the cities of Las Vegas, Tucson, and Phoenix are highly dependent for water. These days, a single hot, dry year could drop the water in the Glen Canyon reservoir by a hundred feet or so. Dead pool means there’s no way to release water downstream, where the needs of 40 million consumers, seven states, and Mexico are considerable. Water won’t be able to flow through the dam. If the water elevation sinks to 3,370 feet, the dam turns into a liability. Dead pool level, which is more critical, sits 120 feet below that. Once the water elevation drops below 3,490 feet, the dam loses the ability to generate power. Power pool is the elevation above which hydropower can still be produced. ![]() Power pool and dead pool are names for two water levels at Lake Powell. The water level at the Glen Canyon Dam has dropped so low-from about 3,678 feet above sea level in 1999 to about 3,520 feet this year-that the Bureau of Reclamation is worried about generating hydropower, one of its primary justifications for building the dam in the first place. It would take a big handful of consecutive high-precipitation years like 2022–23 to recharge the lake. This past single wet, cold winter will not reverse the dropping water level in Lake Powell or meaningfully replenish the comparative trickle that represents the Colorado River. We call it a megadrought the cause is the warming, drying weather, a consequence of human-caused climate change. With the publication of Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang in 1975, the possibility of blowing up the dam and draining Lake Powell entered the folklore of the canyon country, floating above the flood-chiseled slickrock like a summer cloud: it wasn’t clear what was real and what just part of the legend.īut history has caught up with Abbey’s fiction: Today, in 2023, a great drought has descended upon the American West, eclipsing the decades-long scorching that brought the Ancestral Puebloan culture of the Southwest down from the cliff dwellings about 800 years ago. “All dams are ugly,” he wrote, “but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.” My abiding interest in Glen Canyon was fed by Abbey, who, despite mutually cantankerous moments, was my close friend for more than 20 years. Since that introduction, not a season has passed without a conversation-some more serious than others-with activists about removing the dam and draining the lake. This “lake” had been filling with Colorado River water since 1963, when the Glen Canyon Dam was completed by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, giving birth to the impoundment. Fifty years ago, Ed Abbey led me to the wild Escalante River to stick my finger in the mud of rising Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border. ![]()
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