Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West
“…In only seventeen years, two major and opposite crises on the Colorado River threatened the Southwest. First came the flood, then came the drought. Both caught even the experts by surprise, revealing that in deciding to store twenty trillion gallons of Colorado River water behind concrete arch dams, then allowing a civilization to become dependent on that water, we did not know what we were doing. We gambled and got away with it—for now. But Nature is an implacable opponent, with unlimited time and energy. Keep rolling the dice with her, and eventually you will lose.”
Powell investigates the past, present, and future of American Southwest Anglo settlement through the lens of dams, using the Lake Powell reservoir straddling Arizona and Utah as a case study. He explains how the interests of the Bureau of Reclamation, developers, and landowners influenced the building of the dams got us to where we are today: huge desert agro-industrial farms sucking up a majority of the water and supercities like LA, Las Vegas, and Phoenix guzzling the rest, while reservoirs threaten to drop to “dead pool” levels: so low they can’t even spin the turbines used to generate hydroelectricity. A cautionary tale about water management and bribe-induced governmental decision-making.