A Ditch in Time

Excellent writer, she covers the history of Denver water from the mid-1800’s to present. The west was a desert, but when gold was discovered and people moved here, they needed water to live and they transformed the desert with lawns, trees, flowers, and bushes, because they wanted what they had in the east. They built reservoirs and dams with hardly any opposition until the 1960s. They took water from the Colorado River, Blue River, Fraser River, Platte River with reservoirs and tunnels and dams and transformed Denver into an oasis. It used to be easy to build a dam or a reservoir in Colorado, with hardly any opposition, except for those on the Western Slope, but agreements could be made and dams and reservoirs built.  Cheesman Dam was the first dam built and was completed in 1905. Other dams, reservoirs, tunnels followed. In the 1970s, the EPA was created by President Nixon. It was hard to build a dam after that, and the Two Forks Dam was never built. Jim Ogilvie, Denver Water Board manager from 1970 to 1979 said: “The biggest problem with Two Forks is that it was not built soon enough.” No kidding  – they spent over 40 million dollars and the Environmental Impact Statement was 12 volumes. An appointee of George H.W. Bush, William Reilly, national EPA administrator, vetoed Two Forks after decades and reams of paper. Denver seems to have enough water now, mainly due to conservation and recycling, I think.  Very detailed book. I liked the afterword, “Two Decades at a Western Water Utility,” by Chips Barry, Manager, Denver Water, 1991-2010. He made 8 really good points:

1. Our water future is a lot more uncertain than it used to be.
2. Policies often have unintended consequences, and no good deed goes unpunished.
3. Colorado water law is almost always counter-intuitive, and at its worst it is byzantine.
4. We have unfortunately politicized hydrology, and we will regret it.
5. Water conservation is a surprisingly complicated subject, and it is not the answer to every water question.
6. Water lawyers and the environmental community, although always professing to help, make the job of a water utility manager infinitely more complicated and frustrating.
7. The water world has been taken over by the computer geeks, here as much as elsewhere in the world.
8. Most of the world does not understand that water is not a finite resource ,and that we are not “using it up.”