CHEESMAN RESERVOIR — Next week, Denver Water embarks on an $18.3 million plumbing overhaul of corroding fixtures on 105-year-old Cheesman Dam, requiring jackhammers, blowtorches, drills, blasting — and divers dispatched to live underwater for a month in a compression chamber.
An exotic fungus spreading southward through Rocky Mountain forests is threatening Colorado’s oldest trees — the gnarled limber and bristlecone pines that can live longer than 2,000 years.
White pine blister rust fungus afflicts hundreds of those trees on national forest land and in the Great Sand Dunes and Rocky Mountain national parks.
There is no known cure for the fungus, which penetrates pine needles, then covers branches with clamshell-shaped cankers and orange pustules, eventually girdling tree trunks.
“It’s killing trees in Colorado. And it is still spreading,” said Anna Schoettle, a U.S. Forest Service scientist.
A Denver-based federal team fighting invasive freshwater mussels is investigating new and hopeful treatments, including poison, blasts of ultra-violet light and shock waves, and the introduction of a mussel-destroying predatory sunfish.
The researchers testing these tactics say some seem to work and, if proved, could save tens of millions of dollars by protecting western hydropower and water delivery facilities against the proliferating Eurasian quagga and zebra mussels.
“Once the mussels are there, this would help control them,” said U.S. Bureau of Reclamation mussel program coordinator Leonard Willett, who this week was supervising tests at dams along the lower Colorado River.
Front Range authorities poised to divert more western Colorado water to the east face opponents rallying around the mountain lake.
With current diversions already suspected by some of mucking up Grand Lake’s water, any new water removals — such as those proposed by Denver Water and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District — could degrade the lake intolerably, opposition groups and Grand County officials contend.
“I know (Front Range residents) want to take showers, but we have to co-exist. They can’t destroy the beauty here — which is probably part of why they came to Colorado in the first place,” said Pat Raney, 66, one of a dozen or so volunteers who test water quality.
Lying on her belly on the deck of a rocking pontoon boat on the lake, Raney lowered a disc used to measure underwater visibility: “7 feet 4 inches,” she reported to fellow volunteers. “Color is brown.”
That’s less one third of the 30-feet visibility documented in 1941 before diversions here began.
Denver-area authorities are embarking on $760 million worth of massive water-treatment projects, to convert substandard water into drinkable new supplies.
The projects are driven by scarcity — the growing difficulty of drawing sufficient new supplies from mountain snowpack — and by rapid depletion of groundwater wells that some metro residents rely on.
Water providers say they also increasingly are detecting new contaminants, such as pharmaceutical residues from birth-control pills, cosmetics and antidepressants, that they anticipate might have to be removed.
“We’re preparing for the future. There’s still expected to be a lot of growth along Colorado’s Front Range. That’s what these plants are for,” said Steve Witter, water resources manager for the Arapahoe County Water and Wastewater Authority.
“And there may be more contaminants in the water, which we will need to treat,” Witter said.
Colorado River water consumed yearly for agriculture and by the 30 million Westerners who rely on it now exceeds the total annual flow.
A growing awareness of that limited flow is leading to increased scrutiny of urban development — especially projects that require diverting more water to the east side of the Continental Divide.
“We’re no longer in a surplus situation,” said Bill McDonald, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s deputy commissioner for policy and budget. “The teeter-totter has tipped.”
Federal data show that the average annual use of Colorado River water (15.4 million acre-feet) has surpassed the average annual supply (14.5 million acre-feet) in the river.
Denver-area water providers are pressuring state mining regulators to force Cotter Corp. to clean up a defunct uranium mine contaminating groundwater and a creek that flows into a major reservoir.
The latest water-quality tests showed that Ralston Creek below Schwartzwalder mine carried as much as 390 parts per billion of uranium, which is 13 times higher than the 30 ppb health standard. Contamination of groundwater at the source — inside the mine — exceeded the standard by 1,000 times.
Drinking water remains safe, authorities say, because uranium is removed from Ralston Reservoir water by municipal water treatment plants.
A defunct uranium mine in Jefferson County is contaminating groundwater near a reservoir, but government regulators and mine executives have yet to settle on a plan for cleanup.
Prodded by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the Forest Service is reviewing a Colorado coal-mining company’s stalled request to build roads in a federally protected “roadless” forest. The high-level handling reflects tension over efforts to preserve 58.4 million acres of relatively roadless national-forest land across the country. President Bill Clinton’s initiative to create the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule led to years of arguments — including government efforts to defend the rule today in Denver’s 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Colorado has proposed an alternative state plan for managing 4.1 million roadless acres in a way that makes exceptions for coal mining, ski areas and towns threatened by wildfire that want to remove beetle-killed trees.
The federal government has picked a compromise path to protect the imperiled sage grouse, declaring it needs help to prevent extinction but giving Westerners a chance to save it voluntarily before Endangered Species Act restrictions are imposed. Sage grouse became “a candidate species,” in line along with 249 other candidates deemed deserving of federal protection.
A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
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