Professor weighs in on future of Glen Canyon Dam, water sustainability issues

The benefits and the controversy that the Glen Canyon Dam has brought to northern Arizona continues even now, as the dam celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

Activists are still hoping to see the dam demolished and the lake drained, but water managers and others say it’s not going to happen.

Dave White, associate professor in the School of Community Resources and Development, part of the College of Public Programs at Arizona State University, and senior sustainability scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability, weighs in on the issue in an article in the Arizona Republic.

“It’s a non-starter,” said White, also co-director of ASU's Decision Center for a Desert City, which studies water-sustainability options to deal with climate change. “(There is) zero probability of removing either Glen Canyon or Hoover.”

The reason is that those dams, after a wet-weather cycle, can capture and store four years of river flows to dole out during drought.

“(Dam removal) would be fairly catastrophic,” White said. “We have too much demand on an annual basis to be met by the natural in-flow of the river.”

Even without accounting for climate change, he said, the Bureau of Reclamation’s water-supply study found that population growth in coming decades would suck Lake Mead to below 1,000 feet in elevation in seven percent of the years. That elevation is low enough to trigger a water shortage and rationing among the states – something that has never happened. The lake’s current elevation is about 1,107 feet. Farm fields across the Sonoran Desert, which currently use the majority of Arizona’s Colorado River water, could go fallow.

“It requires us to think differently about how we grow,” White said.