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Thursday, October 25, 2007
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Colorado's own Peter Binney shows up in this long article about warming and predictions for the West's water supply, from The New York Times. Read the whole thing, even though you just lived through the drought. From the article:
Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city -- the 60th-largest in the United States -- that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city's viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, "We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that's turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands." Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.
I asked if he had enough water for that many people. "Oh, no," he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.
Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver's water, not Aurora's, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver's taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn't available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.
One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built -- "heroic man-over-nature" achievements, in Binney's words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam -- which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead -- the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. "They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity," Binney says. "Now we've gotten to the end of that era." At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region's population is expected to keep booming. California's Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. "In Colorado, we're sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people," Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region's water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water "in stream" for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.
"colorado water"
8:36:25 PM 
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Here's the satellite view of last summer's melting of the Arctic ice cap through the lens of NASA. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.
"2008 pres"
3:33:36 PM
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Here's an update on the cleanup of uranium tailings near Moab from The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. From the article:
An effort to clean up a 16 million ton pile of uranium mill tailings along the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, hit a milestone Wednesday with the removal of 100 million gallons of contaminated groundwater. The groundwater-removal project is an interim step in the cleanup, which will remove the tailings pile and haul it north to Crescent Junction. In the meantime, the U.S. Energy Department is pumping contaminated groundwater out of the pile at the rate of 250 million gallons a year. Up with that groundwater came 450,000 pound of ammonia and 1,900 pounds of uranium. That ammonia and uranium were prevented from reaching the river, a major step in protecting it and downstream consumers, said Don Metzler, project director for the Energy Department.
The water is being pumped from the pile using a 40-well system that extracts water from a shallow aquifer before its contaminants can leach into the river. Contaminants that escape the pumping system are of such small quantities as to pose no threat to aquatic life or humans, according to the Energy Department. Metzler said he considered trying to capture the uranium and sell it to help defray the costs of the cleanup, which will exceed $120 million. Even though it's a simple process to remove the uranium from the water, Metzler said it wasn't worth the costs of handling, packaging and shipping. "It got complicated, he said. The uranium will be buried with the rest of the pile in an engineered cell to be constructed at Crescent Junction, he said.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
"2008 pres"
7:05:18 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 1:37:30 PM.
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