Lea Rudee
"To Save Water, Drain Lake Powell"

Lea Rudee, former Dean of Engineering at UCSD, charmed the audience at San Diego Dialogue’s Forum Fronterizo on September 17 with the following proposal.

I want to speak as a member of the Board of the Glen Canyon Institute. And I think that this is something that everybody in this room perhaps and certainly even in Northern California can agree on, I hope.

It turns out I got involved with the Glen Canyon Institute because I was outraged as an environmentalist that the second most beautiful canyon in the world was flooded behind Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon dam forming Reservoir Powell. As I studied this problem a little bit more I learned that this lake through evaporation and seepage loses 0.86 million acre feet per year. This is more than California uses over its allotment.

No water comes out of that lake. It’s primarily used for recreation, for the motor boating and house boating from Paige, Arizona. And it turns out the amount of water it loses at the rates that San Diego’s willing to pay for IID water is worth more than the electricity it generates. So this thing is a gigantic loser.

Also closer to home if you look at the flows to the delta of the Colorado, it was 20 years between 1963 and 1982 that this reservoir was billing filled that killed the delta. I’ve talked to several environmentalists or scientists from both sides of the border who agree on this.

Senator Goldwater, just to show this is not a left/right confrontation . . . Senator Barry Goldwater late in life said voting for Lake Powell was the biggest mistake he’d ever made in his entire political career. So I think it would be great if everybody in this room, particularly on the U.S. side, worked on their delegation and on the folks at the Department of the Interior to drain Lake Powell. It would take about 20 years but it would be an enormous benefit and you’ve have both the Sierra Club and a lot of people, other folks in the water industry on the same side of the table. Thank you.