The Lake Powell Pipeline

The more I learn about the chances of the Lake Powell Pipeline, the more I realize that it mainly exists in the dreams of developers, not in the world of reality.

I covered the basic facts of Lake Powell in my blog, White Elephant’s Trunk.

When the states that the Colorado River flows through almost went to war over the water, each state received an “allocation” of the water in an historic agreement. The problem is that the the actual flow of the Colorado is at least twenty percent lower than the amount the agreement is based on. So there really isn’t enough water for everyone. One result is that Lake Powell is going dry.

It gets worse.

The agreement also states that “Upper Basin” states (which includes Utah) guarantee that 75 million acre feet will go down the river to lower basin states during each ten-year period. So, in effect, we get what’s left over.

It gets worse.

The Upper Basin states allocate their water by percentages, not amounts. Utah gets 23 percent of the Upper Basin water. If there is any.

Recently, I learned that a developer in Arizona wants to build the world’s largest water park east of Phoenix. The city of Mesa approved it by an overwhelming margin in the recent election. They plan to have ocean sized waves and Colorado sized rapids. Excuse me, make that, “rapids as big as the ones they used to have on the Colorado.”

In fairness, they claim that they will use arsenic tainted water from wells and it will only use two-thirds as much water as a typical 18 hole golf course anyway – “only” 100 million gallons a year! (How many of those are around St. George these days?)

It seems to me, however, that projects like this show how Arizona is determined to use their full share of Colorado River water for something, anything!

And Utah is not short of schemes either. Another company is planning to build a new nuclear power plant (You can’t run the pumps to generate waves and rivers on mouse wheels!) on the dry plateaus above the Green River. This would definitely cut into Utah’s 23 percent of whatever’s left. And, compared to Arizona’s world class water park, they would really use the water: 30,000 acre-feet a year. (To save you the trouble of converting, that’s about 10 billion gallons a year!)

Maybe in the future, we can develop the mud flat that used to be Lake Powell into a new tourist attraction.