Hi, I'm Paul Lander, and in this segment, we're going to look a little bit to the large public works in the West of United States, particularly, the history of the Hoover and the Glen Canyon Dams. As we've learned before, life in the West is different for a variety of reasons. But in terms of water and looking at water management, one of the distinctions is there isn't a large abundance of water distributed like we have evenly over the East Coast or some of the Pacific Northwest. So one of the needs in any arid, semi-arid areas is to think about storage and that certainly was on the minds of people in the 20th century. Ideas about building some kind of a dam, some kind of structure on the Colorado River had come up for four decades. But it wasn't really until 1905 when there was a massive flooding for the Rocky Mountains that actually wiped out a lot of farmland that the initiative got a little bit more steam, and people in Congress started thinking more intensively with there being an opportunity to build a large dam or storage structure on the Colorado River and some locations had been scouted to some kind of degree. But still discussions that were going on when it appeared after World War 1, there was a tremendous amount of economic activity in Southern California and lots of the other people in the Western states were worried about Southern California really taxing the bounty of the Colorado River, if you will. This led to the passage of what is known as the Colorado River Compact in 1922. You can see in the chart here, there is an allocation to each of the seven basin states. So everybody had, in their minds, in 1922, a fair share of water and everybody knew exactly who got what. But still at this point, there was no infrastructure for delivering that amount of water on a regular basis with any kind of reliability. So the discussion ensued for looking at some kind of a structure on the Colorado River. Ideas were flown, sites were actually scattered. You can see from this drawing here looking at some places an opportunity on the Colorado River. After many failed attempts to get dam on the Colorado River authorized in Congress, it was really a flood event on the other side of the country in Mississippi in 1927 that brought about the sentiments from Southern and Eastern Congress people to think about, well, maybe there's an opportunity here and it's reasonable to think about control structure on the Colorado River. So that followed by the failure of a dam in the Los Angeles area, that led to many deaths, finally, really was the impetus for authorizing and giving money to think about creating a structure on the Colorado River. Again, we have the Colorado River Compact that talked about who got wide, but we really didn't this authorization embodied in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Act that authorized Congress to deliver funds, actually set up a project, and so we could think about bringing water to the people in a more organized and controlled fashion. So this led to what we know as the Hoover Dam today. It was originally called the Boulder Dam for that region but was renamed in honor of who was then Secretary of Commerce, became the 31st president United States, Herbert Hoover. You can see in the photo on the bottom, this was a river system like any other, blue deep canyons and now has a huge controlling structure on it. You can see in the timeline that there were a lot of activity going on in the Colorado River at this point. The Hoover Dam was the big one that really kicked it off, completed in 1935, followed by the Glen Canyon Dam on the upper basin a little bit later. Interestingly, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which we'll here about, together can hold four times the annual flow of the Colorado River. So as I tell my students, these are really big buckets. So they haven't tremendous opportunity to provide regularity, and some reliability to those in the Colorado River Basin. The sister project of the Hoover Dam was the Glen Canyon Dam built for the interests of the upper basin states. Remembering an allocation of the 1922 compact who gets what, there was also a straight division between the upper and the lower divisions. But for the upper basin states to have some security, they really needed their own storage, their own control device, and that led to the building of the Glen Canyon dam and its reservoir now known as Lake Powell. Well the upper basin states were obligated by the 1922 compact to deliver on a regular basis to the lower basin. But again, they had no infrastructure, no controllability of that. So they were really interested in having some kind of a structure, some storage device, if you will, so they could put their water in and have those regular deliveries to the lower basin so that they would be in accordance with the compact. That was the reason and the idea behind the Glen Canyon Dam. You can see the site here that they looked at early on and so that ultimately became built as the Glen Canyon Dam with Lake Powell behind it. Lake Powell was a tremendous recreational resource as any large water bodies in the Western United States because we really crave water. As Powell reminded us 150 years ago, water is hard to find out here, so when we find it, we'd like to use it any way we can. Well at the time, things were really rolling in Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation feeling quite successful having built these large infrastructure projects, and so ideas for were, what else could we do. Glen Canyon is an interesting story in that it was really the compromise. There was also a plan during this era to build a large dam called Echo Dam on the border, just West of the border between Colorado and Utah, in the area now known as Dinosaur National Park. The Echo Canyon Dams, we'll see pictures later, would have inundated that area added substantially more water but really got the iron became the flashpoint for a large segment of the environmental movement of the 1960s if you will. They compromise, we'll let that go but we're going to build Glen Canyon Dam because we need that for the Colorado River. The last big project we think I've in this federal era of large project was the Central Arizona Project. Long considered within Congress and frankly by the Congress people of Arizona. The Central Arizona Project is designed to give the Arizona their allotment of 2.8 million acre feet from the Colorado River Compact to bring that water from the Colorado River over to Phoenix and Tucson where all the people are. Again, our need to deliver the water from where it really is naturally to where the people are, very common theme in the western United States. The Central Arizona Project was completed and when online about 1993 and has meant a huge economic boom and some security for Arizona in that region. So back to Echo Park again, despite that failed attempt, there was still interest in trying to build other structures. So the Echo Park Dam proposed on the Green River in Utah, you can see in the photo here on the bottom. There's a signature rock there that would have been inundated. These were the kinds of images that were put out there to gather support from people to think about actually, are their better places or is there a better way we might actually think about marshaling forces to control the Colorado River? Finally, you can look here, again, reminding us that the large structures we have built on the Colorado River including Lake Powell, they hold together already four times the annual flow of the Colorado River which makes the Colorado River system itself one, if not the most storage intensive river systems on the planet. That being said, there's a growing need for water from cities, and so I think in the urban area, s this conversation will continue; what more can we possibly regard of the Colorado River? As cities, again, with the growing political clout, growing populations, and growing checkbooks, are going to be the ones driving a lot in the future discussions about where we go with water management in the Colorado River Basin.
