For Star subscribers: Debate over how to manage Lake Powell rages on as environmentalists prepare for when Lake Powell drops too low to deliver water.
Editor's note: This is the fourth of six stories for"Colorado River reckoning: Not enough water," an investigative series by the Arizona Daily Star that observes, at length, the future of the Colorado River.Environmentalists have pushed hard to drain the lake and"Fill Mead First," to let Powell's waters run downhill into Lake Mead so Glen Canyon will reappear in its natural state.
Recently, his group and two other environmental groups issued a report asking the bureau to study such a possibility, not for deliberately restoring Glen Canyon, but to prepare for when Lake Powell drops too low to keep delivering water. With that he pulled over a cocktail napkin and drew a sketch of Glen Canyon Dam, the old bypass tunnels, the lake, the river, and the new tunnels with the waterproof valves that would be used to drain the reservoir, Ingebretsen said. His hands worked busily as he explained what he was sketching. Dominy concluded, Ingebretsen said, “This has never been done before, but I have been thinking about it, and it will work," Ingebretsen recalled.
Dominy has been dead since 2010. David Wegner, a retired bureau official who later worked for the Glen Canyon Institute, was also a friend of Dominy’s and held a 100th birthday party for the ex-commissioner shortly before his death in 2010. Wegner says Ingebretsen's story is true and that he and Dominy had discussed this plan when they debated the dam at Colorado College in Colorado Springs back in 1999.
Download PDF Such modifications could follow Dominy’s 1997 blueprint. But at their news conference, Interior Department officials didn't respond to reporters' questions about whether they'd decommission the dam or even whether they'd rule that out. “They didn’t absolutely come out and say we are not going to even consider” decommissioning the dam, Wegner said. “It could be she didn’t want to consider the question; it could be they don’t want to take anything off the table," Wegner said.
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