Why build an expensive reservoir and pipelines to supply Northern Colorado with water when the river will do the job itself, with greater ecological benefit?
dams
Posted inOpinion Columns
Opinion: More dams in more places
Conservation alone will not provide an adequate and reliable water supply.
Posted inOpinion
Opinion: A beautiful synchronicity, in peril
Sixty years ago, I lived just a few hundred feet from the banks of Cherry Creek, which was lined with groves of majestic cottonwood trees. And every year, as summer approached, we kids enjoyed the “snow.” It wasn’t the wet snow of winter, but that of near-summer: a profusion of cottonwood seeds, attached to “cotton” […]
Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns
Opinion: The simple, big reason Colorado’s rivers are drying up
Icy beads of water are beginning to form and flow off the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. As the droplets merge into tiny trickles, they are pulled on vast journeys to the rivers who carry them to the sea. Along Colorado’s Continental Divide, water droplets may embark on a nearly 1,900-mile journey down the […]
Posted inWater
A shrinking county on the Western Slope wants to grow with the help of a new dam. Some say “No, thanks.”
Rio Blanco Water Conservancy District hopes to build an off-channel dam at Wolf Creek and pump river water north to fill it. A nearby landowner and river groups say it’s the wrong idea at the worst time.
Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns
Opinion: There’s nothing green about dams. The federal infrastructure bill should tear them down
Half our country is suffering from one of the worst droughts and most intense forest fire seasons on record. Climate change has Western states parched and burning, yet a key contributor to this crisis is not getting the attention it deserves: dams and reservoirs. To make matters worse, a coalition of hydropower and dam interests […]
Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns
Opinion: We’re running out of water. It’s time to overhaul Colorado’s storage system
On the Western Slope, a truly cataclysmic summer is emerging. The next few months look to be the driest in anyone’s memory. At the headwaters of the Colorado River, water scarcity is now creating dire consequences for ranchers and their surrounding rural communities. Poor snowpack and sporadic rain have turned once lush pastures into meadows […]
Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns
Opinion: We’ve destroyed Western watersheds. It’s time for “ecological reparations.”
American culture is reckoning with some of the negative impacts of our history. We are having significant and necessary conversations — and political outcomes — around the history of race in America. Some of those conversations have started to focus on the important concept of reparations. In the past few weeks alone, St. Paul, Nashville, […]
Posted inEnvironment, Growth, News, Politics and Government, Water
A new federal grant program allots $10 million for high-hazard dams in Colorado, 25 other states
By David A. Lieb, The Associated Press Built for irrigation in 1884, Smith Reservoir in Colorado no longer can hold as much water as it once did. To keep the dam from leaking, the water level at the suburban Denver reservoir is kept at least 2 feet below the level of the spillway — a […]