The Glen Canyon Dam: Supporting Citizens and Extinguishing Ecosystems

“You can’t escape the impacts,” river guide Tom Martin said solemnly as he stared into his mug deep in thought, thinking about dams on the Colorado River. It’s nice to enjoy electric lighting and music as we sit sipping hot beverages by a sunny window; however, there are certainly costs that we, or more specifically, the environment, have to pay for such amenities, Martin acknowledged.

Martin has dedicated his life’s work to conserving the quintessence of the Colorado River. He founded the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association in 1996 with the mission to take a preservationist approach on the environment while still enabling people to enjoy one of the Earth’s most beautiful rivers. “The resource comes first. On the shoulders of a sustainable resource, let’s recreate it,” Martin said.

Although the Colorado is enjoyed by millions of river rafters each year, it is not the same as it was just several decades ago. Glen Canyon dam was built in the 1960s and the once deep, muddy-brown river became cold and blue as it rushed through the series of man-made structures.

But not everyone has taken a deep preservationist approach to the issues behind Glen Canyon dam. “The dam has altered the natural flows of the river in order to benefit human desires and goals,” said hydraulic engineer Paul Davidson in an email. Davidson works for the Bureau of Reclamation in Utah and manages reservoir operations for the Upper Colorado region.

Hydroelectric power generated through Glen Canyon dam is “the most important and widely-used renewable source of energy,” according the U.S. Geological Survey website. By creating a reservoir at Lake Powell and using the natural downhill sloping of the river, engineers at Glen Canyon dam are able to push large amounts of water through spinning turbines that create electricity for over 5 million people in the Southwest.

Glen Canyon dam generates approximately 4.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. “It would take 2.5 million tons of coal or 11 million barrels of oil each year to generate the same amount of power,” Davidson wrote. Along with the electricity it generates, Glen Canyon dam has created Lake Powell for recreation, water storage for times of drought, and water deliveries for agriculture and municipalities.

Hydroelectric dams produce renewable energy, emit minimal pollution, have high reliability and low maintenance costs, but the environmental damage to the river’s ecosystem is unavoidable.

“Did it fail us, or did we fail it?” Martin proposed in terms of the Colorado River. After the Glen Canyon dam was constructed, multiple environmental impacts were set in motion: fish could no longer journey upstream to breed, plants and animals were deprived of nutrients without upstream debris, the water temperature dropped downstream without eddies, the composition of the water changed as sediment was trapped within the reservoir, and wide, sandy beaches disappeared, all resulting in the suffering and loss of native species throughout the canyon.

Joseph Hazel, a geology professor at Northern Arizona University and an employee for USGS, said, “There are now 40 to 50-foot silt banks that the river has cut through.” As the amount of sediment flowing downstream the dam has reduced, beaches and minerals have become absent from the Colorado.

Each year, Hazel and a group of other scientists and students make a trip down the Colorado River in motor boats to map the river. They measure the topographic surfaces of riverbanks at about 45 specific sites, survey campsite areas, and document erosional patterns to provide valuable data for scientists at the dam so they can know how to control the flow through the dam.

“Our problem that is part of our work is that the dam is trapping most of the sediment,” Hazel indicated as he pointed to the array of maps and diagrams of the river pasted onto his office wall.

Many environmentalists and preservationists agree with Martin’s bold assertion “You do so much damage downstream and upstream from the dam, the effects are irreparable… We need to figure out how to clean up the messes that we’ve made,” Martin said.

Martin proposes several varying options — conserve our way into a sustainable dam, carefully plan future mitigations and impacts, or even most extremely “take this dam down.”

Davidson acknowledges the impacts of the dam on sediment flows and changes to local vegetation and wildlife, but offers a positive, humanistic approach to these effects. “Current dam operations are continuously being studied and changed in order to help mitigate these environmental changes.”

Along with Martin’s suggestions to preserve as much of the Colorado River as possible, The Nature Conservancy suggests several other ways to alleviate the environmental impacts of dams on rivers: removing and reengineering old dams, planning better for future structures, and implementing centers of education for builders and stakeholders to learn about creating more environmentally balanced dams. According to the National Hydropower Association, such dams may mitigate environmental impacts by the installation of fish passage devices and hatcheries, erosion and reservoir sediment management, water temperature and oxygen level controls, and surrounding land remediation.

One concern that has arisen amongst both parties pro and against the Glen Canyon dam is the inevitable effects of climate change on the region. For the past 15 years, the Southwest has been suffering a drought. Although the reservoir at Lake Powell was created to provide sufficient water for the dam, even in times of drought, hydrographs from the Bureau of Reclamation in 2012 show a steady average decrease over the years in the amount of precipitation entering the river. “If we’re in a long-term deficit…then we’ve gotta do something,” said Hazel with concern.

So how do we adapt to the declining precipitation levels? Work together. As the climate is slowly changing, people have to conserve water resources being extracted from the Colorado River. We have to conserve energy being produced by not only Glen Canyon, but all of the hydropower dams along the river. And we have to look for other, water-independent sources of renewable energy to provide for millions of energy consumers in the southwest. As we seek to learn about human impacts on the environment, we will be able to better understand our role in making these resources last for generations yet to come.