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Colorado River Report

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Submitted By scheek555
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Colorado River Report "An inhospitable desert has become a playground, and the Colorado River has become a plumbing system.” The Colorado River Report (2000) states that, “the erection of dams, reservoirs, and canals, along with countless diversions, has turned the river in a plumbing system, and today, the Colorado is a river no more.”

The creation of this pluming system has imposed destruction on the river, such as “most of the native fish are endangered, that major bird migration stops are severely truncated and degraded, that some of the most spectacular scenery in the world is less than spectacular” (Colorado River Report, 2000), for example.

The Colorado River Tasks Force concluded that “the current usage of the river is unsustainable. The existing plumbing system is vulnerable to sustained drought or earthquakes, as well as to engineering failure” (Colorado River Report, 2000). Simply put, all of these problems are the outcome of “unbalanced allocation of a critical natural resource, the water of the Colorado River Basin” (Colorado River Report, 2000).

The study expresses that California’s allocation of the Colorado River is 4.4 maf/y, yet California diversions from the river have often exceeded this and have been as much as 5.2 maf/y. The six other basin states have insisted that California implement a 4.4 Plan (of the water that must be delivered by the Upper Basin states to the Lower Basin) to alleviate most or all of these problems. “To do this will require the use of water save in the agricultural distribution system” (Colorado River Report, 2000).

Personally, I am not certain that it is a viable solution. Because it is, however, not evident that any such plan can be implemented without causing major disruption of California’s existing economy.

References

Colorado River Report (2000). Retrieved from http://www.sierraclub.org/rcc/southwest/coreport/index.asp

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