On Sep 18, 4:15 pm, "MLF" wrote:
"k" wrote

The West in the USA is all about water rights. We won't
even talk about energy useage and the proposal to tear
down the dams.
It is a topic that goes on and on and on and on....

Yes, you are correct. However, everyone should keep in mind that the amount
of water now extracted from the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains is
equal to the amount in the rivers. The Colorado River, for instance, used to
flow to the north end of the Bay of California in Mexico. It no longer does,
but rather just dries up in the desert far from its former mouth.

But they say they can knick more out of it!

http://origin.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6919633

Making more water
Ed Quillen, Denver Post columnist
Article Launched: 09/18/2007 01:00:00 AM MDT

The U.S. Department of the Interior has discovered a way to produce
more water from the overworked Colorado River.
(I learned of this not from my own dogged journalistic investigations,
but from Phil Doe of Littleton, who chairs a group of troublemakers
known as the Citizens Progressive Alliance.)
At issue last summer was a pipeline from the San Juan River to serve
Gallup, N.M., and portions of the Navajo nation. Before it can be
built, the Interior Department has to issue a "Hydrologic
Determination" that there will likely be enough water available to
make the project worth building. After all, there's no point in
constructing 267 miles of pipeline if there's no water to put into the
pipes.
On June 8, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne sent a letter to New
Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. "The finding in the Determination is that
there is likely to be sufficient water to support the proposed
contract," Kempthorne wrote, which "removes any Department of Interior
concern about potential limitations of water supply."
The San Juan River is a major tributary of the Colorado River, which
is governed by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was drawn up in
1922, and it was based on the best data available then, which
indicated an average annual flow in the Colorado of about 17 million
acre-feet.
The problem is that those statistics were compiled during years that,
in the grand sweep of things, were unusually wet. More recent studies
put the average closer to 13.5 million acre-feet per year.
So we have a river that was allocated on the basis of 17 million
annual acre-feet, but rarely carries that much water. In our state's
water jargon, the river is "over-appropriated," meaning there are more
legitimate claims on the river than it has water to supply.
And that was before this pipeline was approved by Interior. So how did
Interior determine "that there is likely to be sufficient water"?
Take two logical statements, combine them into illogic, and you can
make water - at least if you're the Interior Department.
Logical Statement 1: The lower the evaporation from the surface of
reservoirs in the Colorado River basin, the more liquid water in the
system. No argument there.
Logical Statement 2: The lower the levels of the reservoirs in the
Colorado River basin, the less surface area there is to suffer from
evaporation.
So, the reservoirs are smaller and thus they lose less water, and
therefore, there is more water available. Believe it or not, that's
how our Interior Department determined that there was water available
for this New Mexico pipeline.
No one seems to have asked, "Why are the reservoirs smaller?" The
answer to that question would be something like, "Years of drought,"
and that would imply that there isn't enough water to go around with
current uses, let alone adding another diversion from the river.
Consider Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. That's hot, dry
country, and so the reservoir drops 6.4 feet a year on account of
evaporation, which works out to 791,000 acre-feet a year - enough
water for more than 3 million people.
Move up the Colorado River to Powell Reservoir (also in a hot desert),
and there's an estimated 884,000 acre-feet a year lost to evaporation
and seepage into the surrounding sandstone. Let's figure only half the
loss is evaporation, and that's 442,000 acre-feet - enough for at
least 1.7 million people.
In other words, the combined evaporative loss from just these two
reservoirs is enough water for all 4.7 million of us Coloradans. So if
we were to remove the dams, the reservoirs would shrink away and
evaporation losses would diminish. Thus there's more water for
everybody in our arid West. So if it works this way, as Interior now
argues, why did it build dams in the first place?



In essense
we are taking all of the water out of the river and have turned it into a
long skinny lake. Most of that water goes to California to maintain
otherwise unliveable cities like Los Angeles and Palm Springs and Las Vegas
that are built in desert climates.

I guess my point is that the issue of water is very important. And whether
you get it from a river, ground water, or an aquifer, make sure you use it
wisely.

Michael
New Orleans, Louisiana USA
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