U of U professor explains why he thinks Lake Powell should be drained
Though the Glen Canyon Dam, the dam that created Lake Powell, has a few positives, it also has several negatives and should, for environmental reasons, be removed, a University of Utah professor said.
Richard Ingebretsen spoke in the Taggart Student Center Auditorium Wednesday about specific reasons for what he sees as the necessity of draining Lake Powell.
Ingebretsen is the founder of the Glen Canyon Institute and is dedicated to the removal of Glen Canyon Dam and restoration of Glen Canyon.
“The good things the dam does,” he said, “is provide power, recreation and prevent the illegal flow of water downstream.”
Ingebretsen said the dam was built as a political structure in 1963 as part of the Colorado River Storage Act. Its purpose was to store water in the upper basin for delivery to the lower basin during drought years.
“There are bad things the dam does,” Ingebretsen said. “The dam evaporates a lot of water.”
Eight percent of the water, equaling about 1 million acre-feet, is lost every year, he said. However, according to the Citizens’ Environmental Report on the Decommissioning of Glen Canyon Dam from December of 2000 that Ingebretsen distributed to the audience, Lake Powell loses only 570,000 acre-feet of water per year due to evaporation.
According to Ingebretsen, other detriments include the damage to wildlife in Glen Canyon.
Five species of wildlife will go extinct, he said, with three more that will go extinct in the wetlands of the delta, for a total of eight. Also, Lake Powell will be lost to sedimentation.
“Seven million tons of silt flow into Lake Powell every minute,” he said.
Removing the dam, which will become clogged with sediment within 200 years, as soon as possible will allow a majority of the sediment to move out of the canyon within 15 to 20 years, thus restoring the natural habitat for the indigenous wildlife, Ingebretsen said.
“If you count yourself as an environmentalist, you have a cause,” he said. “You need to go out and fight for the animals and plants.”
Sarah Lundstrum, president of the Ecological Coalition of Students (ECOS), also mentioned the importance of having a presentation by someone like Ingebretsen.
“It makes the campus think,” she said. “It makes us go ‘Hey. Wait a minute. Is everything the way it seems?'”
Jim Steitz, public lands coordinator for ECOS, said, “Rich does a good job crystallizing the tough choices. He gets people thinking in an ecological context.”