Colorado wildlife overseers flummoxed by a rash of bear-human conflicts are searching for options, from “adverse conditioning” to haze nuisance bears that have been trapped to raising the number of hunting permits to thin the population.
Wildlife officials say hundreds of clashes this summer in mountain towns — including a fatal attack, a mauling and myriad break-ins — require an aggressive response.
A project once considered far-fetched — piping water from western Wyoming across the Continental Divide to Colorado’s booming Front Range cities — is getting a renewed look.
Colorado agriculture officials are widening their battle against the West’s most voracious invasive weed, tamarisk, by deploying a controversial leaf-eating Chinese beetle east of the Continental Divide. As national expenditures in a decade-old campaign to combat invasive species top $1.3 billion a year, proponents see these beetles as cost-saving gems.
But there are concerns. The Diorhabdas may threaten an endangered bird, the southwestern willow flycatcher, which uses tamarisk in New Mexico and Arizona for nesting. The federal government recently was forced by a lawsuit to suspend its releases of Diorhabda beetles in eight Western states — where tamarisk has gobbled more than 1.5 million riparian acres.
Yet Colorado biologists contend the beetle is relatively benign and are pressing ahead — determined to suppress tamarisk with fight-the-enemy-with-its-enemy tactics that so far have proved successful.
Many around Cañon City oppose processing uranium again.
While their plant officially remains an environmental disaster, owners of a Cañon City uranium mill are pursuing a plan to reopen for nuclear business by hauling 12.5 million tons of ore by train from a protected mountain in New Mexico to refurbished facilities along the Arkansas River. Cotter Corp. executives have informed state officials they will crush and chemically leach 500,000 tons of uranium per year for 25 years — starting as soon as 2014 — “dependent upon market forces.” Yet Cotter’s latest data indicate groundwater contamination from Cold War uranium-processing still is spreading unchecked toward Cañon City (pop. 15,850). And federal investigators still haven’t completed a required comprehensive look at whether contamination could be causing cancer and other health problems. Local leaders who long tolerated the contamination — it’s been 25 years since the Environmental Protection Agency ordered a Superfund cleanup — now oppose any project until the cleanup is done.
Demand for materials decreases as supply keeps climbing
White signs on sides of Denver’s curbside recycling pick-up vehicles declare: “Recycling. It’s easier than ever.” But today recyclers say it’s increasingly difficult to move mounting heaps of plastics, cardboard, bottles and newspaper that Denver residents enthusiastically stuff into purple bins.
The problem: The ultimate end-users of recycled material — largely factories in Asia — aren’t buying as much as they did when the global economy was growing. Prices paid to recyclers, which once topped $150 a ton, plunged by 70 percent last fall and have stayed relatively low. That leaves recycling plants, such as Waste Management Inc.’s single-stream facility in Denver, struggling to get rid of the heaps. “Right now, there’s an imbalance,” said Chuck Schmidt, Waste Management’s director of recycling for 11 Western states and part of Canada.
Rural counties struggle to respond to calls, and cleanup often is left to the polluters.
Hazardous-waste spills and discoveries reported to Colorado authorities nearly doubled over the past decade, from an average of 561 a year from 1998 to 2000 to an average of 1,035 from 2005 to 2007. Population growth, carelessness, and the boom in oil and gas drilling are largely to blame. Much of the increase comes from rural Colorado, where towns often lack equipment and training to deal with the growing number of incidents. Some count on volunteers, or Colorado State Patrol troopers, who respond as soon as possible to contain spills yet lack resources for actual cleanup.
Uranium mill
The federal government has begun a required but long-delayed comprehensive review of public health in Cañon City as newly found toxic pollution spreads from a shuttered uranium mill. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry launched the review in response to new data and community concerns that pollution may contribute to unexplained ailments including cancer, miscarriages and neurological problems. Cotter Corp. officials have been contemplating a reopening of their plant to provide yellowcake uranium for an expected national expansion of nuclear power plants. Since 1986, federal authorities have been required to conduct public-health assessments at every “Superfund” cleanup site.
A movement to buy locally grown meat hits schools, and students are chowing the burgers. Is it worth the cost?
The growing movement that advocates buying and eating locally-produced food gains momentum in schools with the introduction of homegrown beef. Proponents contend switching from unknown industrial providers to local suppliers — not just of beef but vegetables, fruits, bread and milk — would be better for kids and build a system where people can know where their food comes from and control it. Boosting local capacity to produce food makes long-term sense, they say — despite prices up to twice as high — because rising oil prices worldwide may mean even higher food costs in the future.
PURGATOIRE CANYON – Footprints provide evidence of a
brontosaurus herd advancing as a sharp-toed predator prowled.
Cave art depicts succulent deer.
Adobe church ruins – a tombstone honors a girl named
“”Lucita” – slump where Spanish-speaking homesteaders once
mourned.
Here in Colorado’s vast Purgatoire Canyon lies a rare natural
gallery, mostly untouched by tourists and fossil-hunters, where
history’s actors seemingly just stepped out for lunch.
What has kept this obscure cleft in the southern Colorado
prairie pristine is partly ruggedness. But it’s also largely the
result of an unlikely landlord, the U.S. Army, pursuing a fresh
preservation strategy: No advertisements. No official
designation as “”wilderness.” No “”public education” about
artifacts and ruins. No easy access.
That preservation strategy wins local support and stands out
abruptly at a time when other canyons around the booming West
are quickly overrun and spoiled.
Now the unusual preservation of the Purgatoire may be about
to end as mainstream land management agencies eye the wildlife
and untrammeled terrain.
Another branch of the federal government – the U.S. Forest
Service – is leaning on the Army to allow easier access to this
canyon for “”multiple use” recreation.
“”It’s public land,” said Bill Bass, regional forest
supervisor. Yet Bass concedes the dilemma taking shape here “”is
a tough one.”
The land in question is semi-arid, covering 500 square miles
– half the size of Rhode Island – in southeastern Colorado east
of Trinidad. A river the color of weak coffee and cream, the
Purgatoire winds down from the 14,000-foot Sangre de Cristo
Mountains, carving a wide canyon through red sandstone cliffs,
before meeting the Arkansas River 80 miles later near Las
Animas. At its deepest, the canyon plunges 1,500 feet below an
undulating rim.
Ranchers controlled all the land here until the early 1980s.
Army moved in
Then, in 1983, the U.S. Army took a 380-square-mile portion,
opened a massive tank and fighter jet training area, and
basically locked it up. They named it the Pinon Canyon Maneuver
Site.
Locals grumbled as tanks rolled onto the tall prairie
grasses, home to songbirds and foxes, for war games. Apache
helicopters would flatten grasses where Apache Indians once
hunted. Swooping F-4 fighters would screech across cliffs as if
in a video game.
Some ranchers thought nature could suffer no worse fate than
to be owned by the Army.
Turns out, 16 years later, the Purgatoire got a pretty good
deal.
The Army kept people out. Signs on barbed wire that read
“”Military Reservation” in red letters, posted where troops
with guns sometimes crouch in the distance, carry clout that
“”No Trespassing” placards lack.
No cattle graze on the Army land. And Army officers spend
more than $500,000 a year, by their calculation, on the
environmental equivalent of luxury health spa care: fencing off
106 archaeological and historic sites, making inventories of
cave art, re-seeding areas where tanks tread, teaching troops
that any artifact they find has scientific value if left in place.
That’s a more comprehensive program than public land managers
from other agencies say they can afford.
Wildlife increasing
Army officials point proudly at growing populations of
antelope, deer, elk, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, rattlesnakes,
mountain lions, bighorn sheep, bears, eagles, hawks, owls and
more.
“”I had to eat crow,” said rancher Willard Louden, who first
went to Washington, D.C., to fight against the Army takeover,
then went back a decade later and testified to lawmakers again,
this time with a different story.
“”I told them that I felt the Army was doing a darn good
job,” 74-year-old Louden said the other day at his home in
Branson.
The Army grants access to about 300 hunters a year. But
Thomas Warren, the Army’s director of environmental compliance
and management, isn’t doing anything to publicize the place.
“”Not my management purpose,” Warren said. “”The more use it
gets, the more it’s going to get degraded.”
Army top brass now view this property as a model for how the
Army can take care of training land elsewhere, Warren said.
“”People in uniform are just as environmentally sensitive as
the rest of the public,” he said.
Legend holds that Indians slaughtered Spanish explorers in the
Purgatoire. The explorers had been sent to the edges of Spain’s
New World empire that bisected what is now Colorado along the
Arkansas River. Historians say reports of Spaniards dying
somewhere out here, without the comforts of clergy, led to
naming of the river: El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio
(The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory).
French trappers later translated that to “”Purgatoire” – the
name on maps today.
Among locals, it’s known as Picket Wire Canyon.
A 6-foot-7-inch Vietnam War veteran, Warren recently
clambered down cliffs, pinon twigs cracking and loose rock
crumbling beneath his boots, to show what this country is like.
Flies swarmed. Temperatures topped 90 degrees.
Rattlesnakes thrive here – Warren delights in warning
visitors to watch out when they get out of their trucks.
He’d been up all night assisting in military war games,
playing the role of a nationalist villain eluding troops that
were supposed to secure an area and catch him. That’s in
addition to this day duty, pistol at his side, keeping tabs on
what the Army now refers to as its environmental and cultural
assets.
Warren stopped at a 30-foot-wide Dakota sandstone panel about
halfway down the canyon. There, an artist had pecked in pictures
of deer, elk, bighorn sheep, fish, birds. Warren’s archaeology
staff believes the pictures are 1,200 years old.
In the middle of the artist’s procession stands a man.
Tendrils from his fingers link him to the creatures. It suggests
“”the interconnectivity of man and wildlife. That’s why I like
it,” Warren said.
Few soldiers-in-training see this site or hundreds like it
located on the sides of the canyon, Warren said. War games stop
one-quarter mile back from the canyon rim to avoid any mishaps.
Above the rim, he incorporates the 106 fenced-off areas,
including a 19th-century stagecoach stop, into training
scenarios as “”minefields” or “”contaminated areas” to keep
soldiers away.
A few dozen scholars have worked on Army-owned parts of the
Purgatoire. Their reports are not always as readily available as
museum directors would like.
“”But it does help preserve,” said Loretta Martin at
Trinidad State College. “”I would hate to see people go out
there.”
Today, the protected canyon is attracting attention from
agencies that manage public-access land – agencies under
pressure from Colorado’s spreading urban population.
The U.S. Forest Service has acquired 23 square miles along
the Purgatoire River – a great opportunity, district ranger
Thomas Peters said. Located along the canyon floor, this land
contains the church ruins and cemetery, an abandoned ranch, more
than 1,000 rock art sites, and a quarter-mile of dinosaur tracks
that University of Colorado paleontologist Martin Lockley calls
“”the Jurassic Santa Fe Trail.”
The Forest Service spent $25,000 last year constructing
limestone jetties meant to keep the shifting river from washing
away dinosaur tracks. Now the agency proposes to do more:
improve a 3.2-mile road into the canyon, install a permanent
toilet, post informational signs, set up a small parking lot.
La Junta business leaders in the past have promoted the
dinosaur tracks as a tourist attraction. State Division of
Wildlife officials say they’re interested in purchasing
Purgatoire ranchland.
Recently, seven Forest Service staffers rode into Purgatoire
Canyon on horses and watered them by the dinosaur tracks. A
fresh track from a motorbike, in the canyon illegally, curved
between pizza-size brontosaurus footprints.
“”Why open it up?” Peters said, sitting on the riverbank
with his feet in the silty water. “”Bottom line is: There’s no
good reason not to. … It’s going to be managed for multiple
use. These are public lands. People ought to be able to enjoy
their public lands.”
Forest Service entry logs show a growing number of mountain
bikers and hikers visiting the canyon after making a steep
descent.
The other legal way for people to reach Forest Service land
here is on guided four-wheel-drive tours. The Forest Service
leads 16 a year, no more than 20 people at a time. But to do
this, rangers rely on the Army’s good graces, calling a training
site supervisor and asking permission to use their “”limited
administrative access.” Therein lies the rub between the two
branches of government – and two different approaches for
managing public land.
The Forest Service wants the Army to grant unlimited access,
and allow road improvements, for recreational use of the canyon.
Aside from entering across Army land, the only other routes to
the canyon floor are too steep for any vehicle, Peters said. Or
the routes require crossing private land – which ranchers oppose.
So the whole Forest Service plan hinges on Army cooperation.
“”I wouldn’t want to commercialize it,” Bass, the regional
forest supervisor, said of the “”multiple use” proposal.
“”There is some truth” in the notion that the Army’s
hard-nosed stewardship is good for the Purgatoire, Bass said.
And future tours still would be guided, he said.
But he emphasized: “”If they (Army officials) hold off the
access, I don’t think that’s right.”
Yet the Army is doing exactly that.
“”I’m not giving it to them,” Warren said. “”The area that
they want, we train on.”
“A salvage operation’
The dangers of opening up the Purgatoire can be seen up a
side canyon, along Trinchera Creek.
On a ledge about 200 feet up, Colorado College archaeologist
Mike Nowak and a team of students were excavating a prehistoric
home site – on State Land Trust property. Access isn’t controlled.
Nowak found that pot hunters had hacked crude holes into the
cave where he planned to excavate for several years.
Now his research is “”a salvage operation,” said Nowak, an
expert on ancient Indians in the region. “”I’m working against
the clock in the sense that I’m afraid pot hunters are going to
come in here, if I’m not here, and really go to town.”
Indians probably lived in this cave on and off for centuries,
he said. It’s an ideal site for investigating how they lived in
tune with a fragile environment.
The holes hacked by pot hunters messed up layers of history
beneath the cave floor. Nowak gazed in dismay at heaps of dirt
shoveled out from the cave, slumping down toward Trinchera Creek.
One of his students, Bonnie Bagley of the University of New
Mexico, picked up a stone grinding tool, arrowheads and raptor
teeth from those heaps.
Context lost
Pot hunters focused on finding collectible shards render
artifacts like these useless, Nowak explained, because the
objects are pulled out of context. Archaeologists value them as
they lie buried, in relation to other objects.
Pot hunters “”are just doing something that is fun to them,”
Nowak said. “”If they knew what damage they are really doing,
they might not do it.”
Faced with growing western cities and the waning of cowboy
culture, more and more people out here on what feels like a last
frontier are intrigued with the possibilities of hard-nosed
stewardship.
The La Junta Chamber of Commerce, while keen to promote
economic development, prefers a strategy that can “”keep it (the
Purgatoire Canyon) a pristine area,” said chamber President
Cheryl Freidenberger.
She said she “”doesn’t hear the grumbling” about Army
ownership from ranchers anymore.
River gets new life, but demands pile up
After diverting, damming, draining and dumping on the South
Platte River for decades, Coloradans now dream of turning the
weary waterway into a beauty.
“”There’s something about a river system that seems to tug at
your heart and soul,” said Max Dodson, assistant regional
director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who has
paddled his raft down dozens of Western rivers.
But the South Platte tugs different people in different
directions. Designing the river of the future – from mountain
headwaters through the prairie and into Nebraska – means
figuring out how to balance clashing priorities.
The metro area’s booming population loves the South Platte as
a lifestyle amenity, with plenty of water rippling through
mountain and urban parks that are staging grounds for boating
and fishing forays. Denver leaders plan riverfrontapartments and
a massive entertainment complex.
Bird-watchers, hunters and government biologists want to
groom the South Platte as a wildlife preserve, home to
white-tailed deer and songbirds. Instead of landscaping, they
want cottonwoods preserved to house wood ducks and herons.
Rather than expanding paved trails for roller skaters, they want
restricted access and signs that urge skaters to be quiet.
A third contingent would harness the river as a water supply
for tomorrow’s suburbs and golf courses. The 2.5 million
population of Colorado’s South Platte River Basin is expected to
top 3.5 million by 2020, and the Denver Water Board says
existing water supplies will no longer meet demands by 2013.
But more upriver reservoirs to sustain new development would
mean less water for parks and wildlife habitat. Farmers
downriver from Denver may hold water rights that keep some water
flowing, but developers have the money to buy those water rights.
While forces for recreation, wildlife habitat and urban
growth tussle, others see hope in managing the South Platte more
efficiently. Water engineers are working on new ways of storing
South Platte water underground, reducing the need for big
reservoirs. Others envision filtering even the slimiest sewer
water until it’s clean enough to drink.
Yet even as new technology raises hopes for the future, the
question remains: Can a relatively feeble river satisfy everyone
at once?
On a grassy riverbank in the South Platte’s Elevenmile Canyon,
Prince Dunn and his family found a paradise where the phone
doesn’t ring, money doesn’t matter and smog doesn’t clog the air.
Getting there requires less than an hour’s drive in their
blue van from Colorado Springs. The Dunns plan to recharge along
the South Platte for the rest of their lives.
“”We like the open spaces,” said Dunn, 58, a former military
contractor from the Washington, D.C., area who now works at
Falcon Air Force Base. He cradled his camera with a contented
sigh.
As the South Platte splashed over rocks, Dunn’s 6-year-old
son, Colin, cast a fishing line into a promising pool. Every few
minutes, the boy yelled “”I got one!” and tugged optimistically
on a slack line.
Dunn’s wife, Dianna, sat in the golden grass reading a
mystery called “”Riding Shotgun” while dogs Rose and Jessica
ran in a meadow.
“”This is perfection,” Dianna said.
For now, at least.
A mile down the canyon, the Dunns glimpsed the future. More
than 100 vehicles rumbled up the washboard road through
Elevenmile Canyon that morning.
U.S. Forest Service rangers estimate that the 30,000 people
who visited the canyon last year will increase over the next
decade to 70,000.
And not all will crave the tranquility so important to the
Dunns. Forest Service officials were shocked by a survey they
conducted that found a majority of visitors in Elevenmile Canyon
prefer crowds to quiet. More people mean more fun, those
surveyed said.
As the Dunns fished, beagles and terriers, old men and
children climbed out of cars. Rock climbers wearing neon-green
harnesses headed for the granite boulders towering over the
river. A woman in a lavender bikini oiled herself and reclined
in happy submission to the sun.
Above the canyon, it’s getting harder to keep fishermen happy
as they float around Elevenmile and Spinney Mountain reservoirs
on canvas-covered rubber boats, casting their lines and sipping
cans of beer.
“”Fishermen are catching maybe a fourth of what they caught
12 years ago,” said Dave Spencer, the area’s state ranger, with
20 years of experience on the job. “”They’re not as happy to be
here. Their nerves are on edge.”
Rangers are looking for ways to accommodate more people.
They’ve already built a $300,000 shower and laundry complex
at Elevenmile Reservoir, which has attracted women and children
who once stayed home while their husbands went fishing.
Ultimately, more people will mean more rules along the river,
rangers said.
At Elevenmile Canyon, there’s a plan to pave the riverside
road to reduce erosion that could clog the river with gravel.
There’s also a plan to close the last three miles of the
canyon road, as well as three campgrounds in the canyon ruined
by vandals. In the future, access to the river is likely to be
limited, initially on a first-come, first-served basis.
Eventually, rangers suggest higher entry fees – entering
Elevenmile Canyon now costs $3 – and maybe a permit system.
All this is fine with the Dunns. Anything to help preserve
Elevenmile Canyon as a quiet place for fishing and a family
retreat.
“”No ice cream vendors,” said Prince, who serves on the
citizens advisory committee for the Pikes Peak Area Council of
Governments and advocates a radical remedy that would defy the
forces shaping the future of Colorado and its beleaguered Front
Range river.
“”My answer is: Stop the growth,” he said. “”You just stop
the urban development.”
The tenacity of a pheasant hen along a stretch of the South
Platte near Sterling amazed state wildlife biologist Warren
Snyder.
He watched as the bird tried to raise chicks. The first time,
a coyote discovered the nest and ate the eggs.
Then the pheasant built a new nest in a riverside alfalfa
field. This time, the eggs hatched. But a farmer’s combine mowed
through the nest and killed the tiny chicks.
The persistent hen tried again. It built another nest and
laid more eggs. This time, the chicks survived.
In Snyder’s mind, South Platte birds like that pheasant
symbolize the river’s natural resilience. He and hundreds of
other government biologists want to take advantage of that
quality. By nurturing the South Platte, they plan to create a
riparian corridor lusher than at any time in the river’s history.
Wildlife advocates envision turtles the size of manhole covers
swimming in the shadows of factories, wood ducks proliferating
at edges of farmers’ fields.
The vision extends from mountainous upriver stretches – where
federal rangers propose a protective “”wild and scenic”
designation – through a series of river corridor parks on the
prairie ending near Nebraska at Tamarack Ranch.
There’s been progress toward this vision: The Colorado
Division of Wildlife owns or operates nearly one-fifth of the
riverbed through the state as a preserve. And there’s growing
public support for wildlife habitat.
Hunters concerned that vanishing habitat threatens birds are
taking action through organizations such as Pheasants Forever.
The group, for example, pays for studies that provide data for
taking better care of birds.
Also, growing numbers of city folks flock to the river
corridor east of Denver to watch birds and take pictures. One
million Coloradans count themselves as bird-watchers, according
to local bird-watching clubs. They comb the river corridor
looking for birds they haven’t spotted before. Looking ahead,
a group of prairie residents is trying to protect about 15,000
acres along the river near Orchard as wildlife habitat.
In 1993, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a
Centennial National Wildlife Refuge in the area. Locals opposed
that plan, suspicious of federal control. Now the locals are
trying to do much the same thing themselves. In January, they
created a land trust to prevent riverside development that might
hurt wildlife.
Preserving wildlife will require more of the expertise that
biologists like Snyder and his partner Tom Remington provide.
After all, the South Platte in its natural state barely
supported trees, let alone wood ducks and deer. The wildlife
habitat that biologists envision would be mostly a man-made
creation, requiring constant monitoring to measure and adjust
changes.
Tromping along a side channel near Sterling this spring,
Snyder and Remington extolled the benefits of floods. If new
dams are built upriver, flooding would be less likely.
Massive floods before the Platte was dammed scoured away most
cottonwoods. But biologists have found that a small flood
encourages growth of cottonwood trees, which serve as homes for
birds.
“”That’s regeneration,” Snyder marveled, touching a tiny
green cottonwood seedling. A blue heron flapped down the river.
A wood duck shot up from a bank. Three quail rustled in the
bushes.
On state-owned land, and on private land owned by cooperative
farmers, Snyder and Remington are trying to help nature along by
planting thousands of sorghum plants and plum trees as cover for
birds. Their bird counts show that this strategy works. Bird
densities on state-run preserves are twice what they find in
heavily farmed areas along the South Platte.
None of the biologists’ work will matter if the South Platte
continues to be contained and tamed as a water-supply system.
Vast stretches of downriver habitat could dry up within a few
years.
Yet the South Platte still is the lifeline for 2.5 million
people. The Denver Water Board predicts a water shortage of
100,000 acre-feet a year by 2045 if no new dams are built. (An
acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to supply an urban
family of four for a year.)
Plans for recreation and wildlife habitat “”are all to the
good if we have ways of keeping water in the stream,” said Ed
Pokorney, planning director for the board. “”But to what extent
are we to import water from the Colorado River Basin so that we
can maintain the South Platte? The metro area is going to need
more and more water. Well, where is that water going to come
from?”
Nobody has a proven solution. But water engineers are
experimenting with new technology to use the South Platte more
efficiently.
One scheme is underground water storage. The engineers
foresee fields of wells up to 2,500 feet deep in aquifers
beneath the metro area, connected through a network of pipes to
surface water in the South Platte and to water delivery systems
for households.
The idea is to refill the aquifers in wet years, when spring
snowmelts send more water down the South Platte than farmers and
reservoirs can handle. In dry years, the aquifers would supply
water.
So far, Douglas and Arapahoe counties, which rely on aquifers
to provide water for new housing developments and businesses,
lead the way in aquifer storage.
On a windblown bluff south of Highlands Ranch recently, water
consultant Courtney Hemenway parked his pickup and lifted the
lid off a cement bunker. Below it, a pipe went down 1,500 feet
into an aquifer.
Hemenway climbed down a ladder into the bunker. He gripped a
metal wheel with both hands and turned it. Instead of sucking
water out of the aquifer, the well began pumping water from the
South Platte River back into the aquifer for storage.
Hemenway can move more than 480 gallons of water a minute
into the aquifer through this well. He has supervised
retrofitting of four other wells in the area for two-way flows.
It’s possible to store “”as much water as we want” in
aquifers, says Lee Rozaklis, coordinator of a state task force
that has been brainstorming water supply problems since 1989,
when federal officials blocked the proposed Two Forks dam along
the South Platte. The dam would have supplied water for the
metro area.
The aquifer approach has complications. New reservoirs would
be necessary to hold river water until it could be pumped into
aquifers. The amount of water that can be stored is limited by
the number of wells drilled. Also, there’s still the issue of
changing downstream flows by diverting water from the South
Platte.
Another way water suppliers hope to reduce reliance on the
South Platte is by recycling – purifying sewer water until it’s
drinkable.
Denver and EPA officials teamed up in the 1980s to build a
$40 million laboratory, located along the river at Denver’s
northern edge, to test water-recycling technology. After the
treatment, sewer water was cleaner than water coming out of taps
in Denver. It could work on a large scale, officials concluded.
Water board plans call for recycling up to a fifth of the
total metro-area water shortfall envisioned for 2045.
But recycling, like aquifer storage, diverts water from the
river. Today, about 35,000 acre-feet a year of treated sewer
water gushes back into the South Platte at the north edge of
Denver. Federal wildlife agencies may require Denver to maintain
that flow.
Coloradans share their water predicament. Booming Western cities
from Boise to Bend face growing demands on rivers for
recreation, wildlife habitat and water supplies.
But nobody is demanding quite so much from a single, small
waterway.
“”We’re asking one very small river to provide recreation,
habitat, water, and it’s not much of a river to do all that,”
Pokorney, the Denver Water Board’s planning director, said with
a sigh.
“”Can we sustain this? I’ll tell you this: If people don’t
work together, we’ll be in dead straits.”
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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