BuRec Now Projects Possible Worst-Case For Glen Canyon; End Of Generation As Early As July 2023
The first sign of serious trouble for the drought-stricken American Southwest could be a whirlpool. It could happen if the surface of Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir along the Colorado River that’s already a quarter of its former size, drops another 38 feet down the concrete face of the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam here. At that point, the surface would be approaching the tops of eight underwater openings that allow river water to pass through the hydroelectric dam.
The normally placid Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, could suddenly transform into something resembling a funnel, with water circling the openings, the dam’s operators say. If that happens, the massive turbines that generate electricity for 4.5 million people would have to shut down — after nearly 60 years of use — or risk destruction from air bubbles. The only outlet for Colorado River water from the dam would then be a set of smaller, deeper and rarely used bypass tubes with a far more limited ability to pass water downstream to the Grand Canyon and the cities and farms in Arizona, Nevada and California.
Such an outcome — known as a “minimum power pool” — was once unfathomable here. Now, the federal government projects that day could come as soon as July.
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In August, the Bureau of Reclamation announced it would support studies to find out if physical modifications could be made to Glen Canyon Dam to allow water to be released below critical elevations, including dead pool. That implies studying such costly and time-consuming construction projects as drilling tunnels through the Navajo sandstone at river level, said Jack Schmidt, a Colorado River expert at Utah State University. “There was a time in my professional career that if anybody from Reclamation ever said that, they’d be fired on the spot,” said Schmidt, who served as the chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center during the Obama administration. Even raising that issue is “a huge sea change telling you how different the world is.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/01/drought-colorado-river-lake-powell/