November 14, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Africa Lifelines: A THREE-DAY SERIES
Engucwini, Malawi – Five times a day, Agnes Munthali hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head. Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
But water needs gnaw most urgently here and across rural Africa,
where 303 million villagers lack access to a safe source.
Waterborne disease kills thousands every day.
Munthali and others carry the buckets, weighing up to 45 pounds,
using bone, muscle and sheer will, while the gray Zombwe Mountains
loom in the distance.
On a recent clear morning, Munthali, a vivacious 35-year-old whose
smile reveals a missing front tooth, shrieked with laughter at an
outsider’s suggestion that the government will address water woes.
For villagers, government “doesn’t work,” Munthali said.
Villagers can’t even approach politicians, she said. If one did,
politicians “would turn him down.”
As it is, Munthali and her water- carrying neighbors consider
themselves lucky.
For the first time in years, the water they haul is clean – not
because Malawi’s government helped, but because Engucwini connected
with a private group of Americans half a world away.
The villagers teamed up with Water for People, a Denver-based group
that funds self-help projects. This year, the group arranged for
installation of a 150-foot-deep well within a mile of Munthali’s
mud-brick hut.
“I’m very happy about this,” she said.
More than 2,000 villagers a day flock to this well for clean water.
Previously, they had no choice but to drink contaminated water from
hand-dug pits.
Americans may assume the world’s poorest people suffer silently,
but more and more are able to ask for help using cellphones, e-mail
and other connections, circumventing corrupt or cumbersome
governments, said Solomon Nkiwane, a Zimbabwean political scientist
at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Villagers increasingly form committees and pursue their interests
anywhere they can find help, Nkiwane said.
“This people-to-people thing is beginning. It may be a drop in the
bucket. But maybe this is the approach we should take,” he said.
Malawian life expectancy has fallen from 42 years in the 1970s to
39 in recent years because of AIDS and diseases caused by
contaminated water. And income is falling. Farmers in this area
earn about $8 a month.
The project began a few years ago when the local doctor, Steven
Chavinda, 65, called chiefs together and asked: “What are your
greatest needs?” All the chiefs said the same thing: clean water.
One chief, Mishek Ndzima, had lost his son to cholera, spread by
feces in water.
Chavinda told a U.S. Peace Corps worker posted nearby, who informed
a Malawian who worked as regional coordinator for Water for People.
That led to installation over the past 18 months of two wells at a
cost of $25,000. Denver-based supervisors lined up a local crew to
drill the holes and oversee maintenance training.
“The best solutions come from sitting down as close to the problem
as possible and talking with the people,” said Steve Werner,
executive director of Water for People, at his headquarters in
Denver.
Villagers worldwide propose dozens of projects each month, often
learning of the group through the Internet. Werner and 20 staffers
in five countries review all proposals. Sponsored by the American
Waterworks Association trade group, they fund what they can on an
annual budget of around $2.8 million: about 80 projects, including
40 wells from Bolivia to Vietnam.
In Malawi, the first of the two wells helped revive the local
health clinic. The clinic, built in 1984, for years offered only
limited services because of a lack of water. Government officials
never supplied medicine as they do at other rural clinics. Radios
for emergency communications weren’t maintained. A 10-bed maternity
wing never opened.
This year, villagers notified health officials that the clinic has
water from a foreign-funded well with a solar-powered pump. And
health-ministry crews delivered mattresses for maternity beds, said
Manford Nyirenda, 49, chairman of the village water committee.
“We pushed them into action,” Nyirenda said, smiling, finger on
the pump power switch.
At the other well, Munthali gripped a hand pump and pushed up and
down as the noon sun beat down. Clear water gushed from the tap.
Women and girls took turns filling blue and orange buckets,
chattering. Between buckets, girls jockeyed to drink from the tap,
including Munthali’s pride and joy, Memory, 8, in a torn red
dress.
Last year, Memory got sick after drinking contaminated water from a
shallow well. “Very bad for her,” Munthali said. Purifying water
by boiling was impractical, given limited wood in the area.
Most of the 18,000 villagers around Engucwini still rely on water
drawn from hand-dug pits. Cloudy, stagnant pools in the pits
contain bacteria that cause cholera and diarrhea, known locally as
“open bowels.”
Malarial mosquitoes breed in mud around the pools. Women wash
clothes close by.
At the health clinic, the doctor Chavinda recently faced Ester
Chiumia, 32, cradling her dehydrated month-old son, Samuel. She had
walked since sunrise to reach Chavinda in his concrete building
without electricity. Now it was noon.
Gazing down at her baby, Chiumia said Samuel had bloody diarrhea
and no appetite.
Chavinda looked at her silently at first. At that moment, he lacked
the right medication. He saw Chiumia practically shaking with fear.
He gave her a folded piece of paper containing a couple tablets of
an adult antibiotic – the closest substitute he could find – with
instructions to cut each pill in half.
Chiumia nodded, still worried. She told the doctor the water she
hauls “looks dark. … We have no choice.”
At least 150 villagers die around Engucwini each year from easily
preventable sickness from contaminated water, Chavinda said. Deaths
decreased a bit recently in the area around Engucwini’s two new
wells, he said, “but we’ve got a lot more work to do.” He
reckoned Engucwini needs at least 20 wells.
Today, girls skip school to join the stoic parade of women hauling
water. And mothers are resigned that contaminated water will kill
kids.
“We do take chances here,” one woman said, watching her
granddaughter, Tiyese Chirwa, climb down a log into a muddy pit and
dip her bucket into a plate-sized milky pool of water.
Some villagers here struggle to find water at all. At an outlying
area called Chileda, there are no wells within 5 miles for an
estimated 5,000 people. For them, even marginal water is precious.
Barefoot boys in raggedy clothes were there, some with bellies
bloated from malnourishment, crouched around a drying water hole.
They had been digging it out a bit trying to coax more water from
the ground. A saucer-sized cloudy white pool of water only grew
more opaque.
Desperate, Chileda chiefs recently dispatched Frank Kumwenda, 29,
to go to the regional capital, Mzuzu, for help.
He set out by bicycle at 4 a.m., bouncing down a dirt road. He
pedaled furiously, crossed the sewage-contaminated Kasitu River
before anybody was up and reached the pavement of Malawi’s main
north-south road.
Then, moving along faster, he noticed some roadside villages had
wells. “I compared them to us,” Kumwenda said. “We are still
behind.”
Kumwenda drank from one well, savoring the water on his journey.
He reached Mzuzu and its government offices by 9 a.m.
“I found the secretary,” Kumwenda said.
He announced that he had come to get help for his village.
“The secretary said, ‘The boss is not in the office,”‘ he said.
When he rode home that afternoon after a fruitless wait and told
what had happened, the chiefs were angry.
Kumwenda planned to try again soon.
Meanwhile, Munthali, sitting with relatives at their tidy farm
compound, said she wants to be part of a local maintenance team to
make sure the new wells work properly.
Men had assumed they would travel for maintenance training, but
Munthali said, “We’ll need a good mix.” After all, women haul
most of the water.
And while acknowledging the pressing needs of villagers at Chileda,
she also proposed drilling a new well closer to her home.
Today, even with a clean water source a half mile away, she and
Memory still must devote much of each day to trekking back and
forth.
In America, “people have a much easier life,” Munthali said.
“How can that happen here?”
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
November 13, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Idweli, Tanzania – From the back of a lantern-lit schoolroom at a rural orphanage, Fodi Julius fixed his shining eyes on the blackboard. He was fighting exhaustion and trying to please his parents.
They died three years ago, leaving Fodi, 11, and his brother,
Nhambo, 8, among Africa’s 12.3 million children who’ve lost parents
to AIDS.
Their mom and dad’s final advice: Do well in school, because
survival depends on it.
Before moving to the orphanage, Fodi and Nhambo rose each morning
from their mats by a fire pit in their crumbling mud-brick hut.
They straightened their smudged school uniforms. Their small
fingers wove grass in place of lost buttons to fasten tattered
shirts.
The boys set out barefoot and without breakfast down the dirt path
to school. At lunch break, while others ate, they waited. Finally,
when the teacher dismissed them for the day, Fodi and Nhambo
wandered through farm fields, foraging for food.
“We’d get leaves,” Fodi said. He weighs 48 pounds, half the
weight of others his age.
He mixed those green leaves with water and urged Nhambo to eat, no
matter how bad the leaves tasted or how sad he felt.
“I’d just tell him: ‘She died. There’s nothing we can do about
it.’ I’d tell him: ‘Even if you cry, she’s not coming back. So we
should stop crying and do what we have to do.”‘
But now, after three years on their own, Fodi and Nhambo have beds,
meals and basic instruction at an experimental children’s center
where they live with 56 other orphans on the outskirts of this
dusty, Swahili-speaking village.
Americans half a world away in Colorado and Oregon set up the
center – stepping in where governments and big charities had done
nothing.
As the world grows more intertwined, African villagers mired in
disease, poverty and conflict – and those who want to help them –
are discovering new ways to connect, bypassing Africa’s
corruption-crippled governments and Western bureaucrats.
Television, radio and reports from migrant sons and daughters have
whetted village appetites for better living conditions. The recent
arrival of cellphones and e-mail in rural hubs encourages direct
links with Americans.
Help began with an e-mail
Here at Idweli, whose 1,300 people include more than 200 orphans,
the children’s center where Fodi now finds full plates of rice and
potatoes began with a simple e-mail.
Godfrey Mahenge, a student from Idweli studying medicine in
Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, five years ago vowed to do
something to help orphans back home. He’d told elders of his plans.
They’d dismissed him as a dreamer.
Mahenge drowned five years ago while swimming in the ocean. But his
girlfriend, Neema Mgana, kept sending e-mail queries to groups
outside Africa. One e-mail reached Barry Childs, 61, a corporate
executive turned philanthropist in Oregon who’d formed the group
Africa Bridge to try to help villagers.
Instead of dismissing the message as just another African e-mail
scam, Childs asked for details. He paid for Mgana to visit him.
Childs enlisted Vic Dukay, 49, a former aviation-business owner in
Denver with experience running AIDS projects, to work with him at
Idweli. Their first visits in 2002 focused on listening to children
and village elders.
“You want to be useful,” said Dukay, a heavyset, jovial man prone
to overworking himself. Orphaned at age 15, he was later moved to
tears as he sat with kids unsure where they’d find their next meal
and who habitually raised their hands before speaking.
“It took me back instantly to when I was 15,” he said. “That
look in the eye, body language, speech, that low, soft voice,
wanting to be in the back of the room away from everybody, not
wanting to be seen. You look in their eyes. Have you ever seen
anybody really sad? I can see sadness in somebody’s eyes. …
Probably from looking at myself.”
Dukay and Childs guided construction of the center, five ochre-hued
buildings with cement-and-stone foundations. Village men did the
work. There’s no electricity or running water.
This year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dukay a grant to
assess whether the children’s center is meeting village needs. He
led an evaluation team, including psychologists and social workers,
on his 10th visit to Idweli this fall – feeling “more alive than
I’ve ever felt,” he said.
Staving off extremists
Sustaining this children’s center, and possibly replicating it
elsewhere, is more than a humanitarian effort, Dukay said. Security
analysts worry that Africa’s millions of desperate AIDS orphans
will join jobless urban masses adrift and vulnerable to extremists
who could lure them into violence.
“Where best to recruit?” Dukay said. “Out here in the
hinterlands where there is no security.”
He watched Fodi playing soccer in donated white sneakers, fighting
hard for the ball against bigger players, despite his physical
weakness after three years of eating very little. Nhambo, solitary
and silent, played a bit, too.
Any chore, Fodi volunteered. He hauled a 16-foot-long bamboo pole
for a mile to help cooks who were building a shelf.
Life’s better now than before, Fodi said, recalling how taunts from
children with parents tormented him.
“I’d leave, go sit someplace alone. Very bad to hear. I thought:
‘This will happen many times in my life. People will always be
telling me I am an orphan.”‘
Far more typical across Africa today are orphaned children who
raise other children with no help. Village elders are overwhelmed.
Nearby at the village of Ndulamo, three teenage girls – Shida
Mahenge, 16, and her sisters, Ona, 14, and Rehema, 12 – huddled
together at sunset. When they beg for food from neighbors, “people
cannot give,” Shida said.
For five years after AIDS killed their father and then their
mother, Shida served as surrogate parent and caretaker, insisting
that Ona and Rehema stay in school.
“I’m always telling them they need to behave and to listen to
their teacher and when they don’t understand, to ask questions,”
she said.
She deals with food. Working to earn money means enduring
harassment from boys and men unaccustomed to working with a girl.
First, Shida broke rock into gravel that villagers sell to road
crews for maintenance.
“Very hard work. You have to carry the rocks. It takes a long time
with the hammer to break the rocks into small stones. Now, I work
carrying timber. I think it might be better.”
But this night they had no food or wood to burn and stay warm. The
girls huddled silently in the cold, blue darkness. They were
hungry, barely able to think about their dreams of attending a
vocational school.
“We like to pray,” Shida said. “We have a very hard life now. We
pray to God to help us, so that we will not get sick. … We need
help to survive.”
HIV adds to struggles
Helping children such as this can be difficult because many are
infected with HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Doctors are scarce,
about one per 50,000 people in rural Tanzania, let alone anti-retroviral drugs for villagers.
At a German-run clinic nearby in Bolongwa, Dr. Rainer Brandl was
amazed to see a tiny, bloated girl, her feet swollen, staggering in
from a farm.
When he tested Veneranda Ganga, 13, he found she was HIV-positive with virtually no immunities. Doubting she’d survive,
Brandl put her on anti-retrovirals.
Veneranda gained strength. She began helping around the hospital,
cradling an abandoned 1-year-old girl. She told nurses she’d been
sick for years, after her father died of AIDS. Later, her mother
died, too, when Veneranda was 5. Before dying, she said, her mother
told her: “You must listen to other people. One day I will die,
and you must get along.”
Each day Veneranda retrieved water, washed dishes and took care of
her brother and an aunt’s two young children. This year, she grew
too weak to work. “I told my uncle, I better go to the
hospital.”
Frustrated and deluged with sick children, Brandl works on a
shoestring, unable to pay and keep staff. United Nations and U.S.
aid often funds workshops for doctors and social workers in cities,
drawing them away from urgent work in villages, he said.
“Nobody wants to work out here,” he said.
Orphans start to cope
At the Idweli children’s center, regular meals, chores and classes
let orphans begin coming to terms with their plight.
Vaileti Bonifasi, 14, who was 2 when her parents died, said she’d
been sneaking away to visit their graves, praying a bit, talking
and crying.
“I was walking back home from school thinking: ‘How can I not even
know what my mother looked like?”‘ Vaileti said. “I thought about
it all the way home. And I was lying on my bed. When I got up, the
ghost of my mother came to me. She was speaking to me. But I
couldn’t understand her.”
Godfrey Mahenge’s younger brother Elia, 21, told Vaileti she should
ask her brother Fred at the family house by the graves if he had a
photo of their mother. When they arrived, they found Fred standing
with his wife, Gloria, and their baby.
“There’s no picture” of their mother, Fred said. Instead, Fred
produced a wrinkled, laminated driver’s license showing their
father, who died in 1994. Vaileti clutched it but still wanted a
photo of her mother.
“I need to compare it with the face of the ghost,” she said.
Involving the villagers
The cost of the project at Idweli, including construction and
support for daily operations, has been about $300,000. Now Dukay’s
evaluation is focused on perceptions of villagers and the
children.
“Are there any concerns?” Dukay asked recently in the meeting
hall, addressing village elders. “If there are any problems in
what we are doing, I would like to know directly.”
Some villagers benefit – such as Florence Doset, 39, a mother of
two who teaches at the center. She earns $50 a month.
“Because of these children, we have money,” she said. “So we’re
happy.”
Others are bewildered. Orphans at the center suddenly enjoy better
living conditions and food than other children living with their
parents. Project supporters have begun to give small
“microcredit” loans to villagers.
Fodi is now studying as his parents advised, but the habit of
worrying about Nhambo is ingrained. He recently warned Elia that
Nhambo’s mind wanders in school.
But Fodi also was beginning to think about himself. In the
classroom where he sat recently in the early evening, he summoned
the last energy he had to hold his head up. Three lanterns cast a
golden light just bright enough to illuminate the blackboard. Elia
was teaching English, writing sentences – “You sing a song” – for
students to copy.
This was extra instruction to give the orphans a better chance at
school. Twenty boys, mostly older, were taking advantage.
And Fodi was especially resolute.
He wanted to be ready for competitive tests that determine who
qualifies for college.
“I want to be a teacher,” Fodi said. “Then I can help other
people.”
———————————-
SERIES TEAM
Series reporter: Bruce Finley covers international affairs and
security for The Denver Post, which he joined in 1988. He has
reported from more than 30 nations, including his third tour in
Iraq with a U.S. combat unit earlier this year. This is Finley’s
fifth Africa assignment.
He grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford University in 1984
and earned master’s degrees in international relations as a
Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at NorthwesternUniversity.
Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
Series photographer: Helen H. Richardson previously traveled to
Thailand and Indonesia to cover the South Asian tsunami and to Rome
for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, among other overseas
assignments for The Post, which she joined in 1993. Her freelance
work has appeared in The New York Times and Christian Science
Monitor.
Richardson grew up in Aspen and graduated from Parsons School of
Design in New York.
Richardson can be reached at hrichardson@denverpost.com
Series editor: Mark Harden
Photo editor: Larry C. Price
Copy editor: Eddie Chuculate
Maps and graphics: Severiano Galván
Multimedia producers: Doug Conarroe, Demetria Gallegos
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Today: A Coloradan works in a Tanzanian village where the spread of
AIDS is leaving growing numbers of children parentless.
Also, a Denver FBI agent cultivates African police as partners
against terrorism.
Monday: Efforts by Colorado-based Water for People to drill wells in Malawi help
thousands who search daily for safe water.
Tuesday: Colorado engineers assist Rwandan schoolgirls quavering
from the horrors of war.
Some quoted material in these reports was translated from Swahili,
Tambuka, Kinyarwanda and local dialects.
November 23, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Latin America, Water
As many as one-fifth of the world’s people lack safe water – and 6,000 children are dying every day as a result. But developed nations and companies with know-how are doing less to help.
CANDELARIA, Honduras – Struggling for the water her family needs to
live, Maria Garcia hikes five times a day from her dirt-floor shack
to a creek. The creek – cloudy from pesticides and from villagers
bathing and washing clothes – isn’t safe. Her first son, Roni, died
of hepatitis at age 3 – one of an estimated 2 million children a
year worldwide who die from diseases linked to bad water. Now her
second son, 1-year-old Jose, “is always with diarrhea, always
coughing.” Still, Garcia, 23 years old and seven months’ pregnant,
has no choice. This is the only water she can get.
She scoops the creek water into her red jug. She hoists this
40-pound load onto her back and, stretching rattan cords across her
forehead to support it, claws her way up a slippery clay slope on
the quarter-mile haul home.
“It’s hard to do without falling,” she says. “I’m going to have
to do more trips. I’m going to need the water.”
Today, nobody is moving to help Garcia and the growing numbers of
people – an estimated 1.1 billion, nearly a fifth of humanity – who
lack safe water. Twice that many lack basic sanitation.
The death toll from bad water mounts. United Nations officials say
it tops 6,000 children a day – mostly in low-income Africa, Asia
and Latin America.
Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases that can
lead to fatal dehydration. Most common is diarrhea – easily
preventable in developed nations such as the United States.
But elsewhere, solutions are constrained by spreading poverty and
increasingly limited water resources.
Water shortages and deficient sanitation now are starting to
aggravate conflicts, leading to political turmoil. Three years ago
in Bolivia, slum dwellers rioted when the government tried to
install a water system that required them to pay fees they found
intolerable. International bankers would only back a for-pay
system.
And last month, Bolivian peasants and slum dwellers, riled about
their government’s free-market policies in general, marched on
Bolivia’s capital, hurling dynamite. They forced President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada to resign.
“We could have water wars – not riots, I mean wars – between
countries over control of river systems,” said Andrew Natsios,
chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the
nation’s main humanitarian agency. “We are very worried about
that.”
World aid agencies doing less
In Iraq this year, a sudden collapse of water-supply networks
enraged Iraqis as U.S. troops, who had bottled water, occupied
their communities. In India, a dispute over water allocations has
led to interstate rioting. In China, an estimated 100 million
peasants unable to irrigate crops converge on ill-equipped cities.
In the Middle East, a behind-the-scenes struggle for water strains
efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Water shortages also are expected to spur migration from water-poor
regions to Europe and the United States, where jobs and water are
plentiful.
Many experts believe that a concerted effort to address global
water supply and sanitation should be a priority for the United
States and other wealthy countries. U.S. government studies have
found that installing a basic water system in a village can cut
infant mortality by up to 50 percent.
Yet the governments and corporations that could help instead are
withdrawing from the challenge instead.
Government water aid from 21 of the richest countries to poor
countries decreased by 18 percent between 1997 and 2001, according
to data compiled by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development, an international group based in Paris.
The U.S. government – focusing on military priorities this year –
budgeted only $162 million for water-supply and sanitation help
abroad.
USAID’s Natsios said this will change. The United States will
follow through on a presidential “Water For the Poor” initiative
to spend $970 million over three years “to deal with these
issues,” he said. That money – a third of it approved so far by
Congress – falls far short of the tens of billions U.N. leaders say
are needed.
The other key players in addressing water shortages and poor
sanitation are corporations that can design and install efficient
systems. They, too, are doing less. Private-sector spending on
water supply and sanitation decreased by 82 percent between 1997
and 2002, from $8.3 billion to $1.5 billion, according to data from
the World Bank, the main international financing agency.
Engineering, construction and utility firms aren’t motivated. As
the poor world gets poorer, the potential for profit diminishes.
Companies no longer bid on requests to install water systems even
in megacities – let alone in the villages where more than half the
world’s poor reside, said Don Evans, chief of water operations for
Denver-based CH2M Hill – one U.S. firm in a water industry
dominated by Europe- based conglomerates.
“The poor residents of these countries have no access to water.
They have incredible sanitation issues with huge health impacts,”
Evans said. “It’s a tragedy to these countries that nothing is
going to happen.”
‘It’s very hard to lose a son’
In Honduras, population 6.6 million, one of the poorest countries
in the world, water problems are chronically as severe as anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere. The struggle for clean water is constant
in villages such as Candelaria in the central highlands.
Here, amid screeching roosters and the hum of insects, Maria Garcia
enters her shack and unloads her sloshing jugs beneath rafters
where she stores maize, in the tradition of Lenca Indians,
descendants of the Mayans who once thrived across Central America.
A small fire smokes in the corner.
The only way to make the water safe – Garcia has heard from
visiting Cuban health workers – is to boil it.
But boiling water requires wood. The nearest forest lies 3 miles
away in the mountains – meaning a major chore for Reyes Gomez, 24,
her husband.
“We can’t get that much wood,” Garcia says. At the same time, she
believes that Roni died, and Jose is sick, because “we drink the
water without boiling it.”
The family tried to get help for Roni. Gomez carried the boy 13
miles down the muddy road to La Esperanza – the nearest city.
Doctors took blood and urine samples and sent Gomez and his son to
a regional hospital 60 miles across mountains in Comayagua.
There, nurses sent them back to La Esperanza. Gomez turned to a
private specialist who suggested a test for $147. Gomez sold the
family’s bull for $264 to pay for the test. The specialist
concluded Roni’s hepatitis was chronic. There was nothing to do.
Gomez carried his son home. Six nights later, on Dec. 28, as
parents and grandparents cradled him, Roni died.
“It’s very hard to lose a son,” Gomez said. “You want to kill
yourself.”
Doctors face similar cases every day.
More people worldwide enter hospitals with waterborne diseases than
with any other type of ailment, said Mark Brown, chief of the
United Nations Development Program. Lack of safe water ranks among
the leading causes of death. An estimated 2 million children a year
are victims of water-related diarrhea, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq
said. Typically, the diarrhea comes from swallowing fecal
bacteria.
In a dimly lit emergency ward along the northern coast of Honduras,
Dr. Marta Benitez said 40 percent of her patients are children sick
from foul water. It’s a bigger killer than the mosquito-borne
malaria and hemorrhagic dengue fever that also haunt Central
America.
During a recent night shift, Benitez and two nurses handled five
critical cases. One dehydrated boy, Daniel Ramos, 3, lay on a
gurney, eyes rolling as he drifted in and out of consciousness,
loops of white tape holding an intravenous tube on his tiny right
wrist.
“He’s always sick with diarrhea,” said his mother, Esperanza
Hernandez, 27. He’d been crying that his stomach hurt, and in the
middle of the night his family hustled down a rocky trail from
their village in foggy forests above banana plantations. “I was
worried he would pass out on the way to the hospital,” Hernandez
said.
The family drinks stream water. “We don’t boil the water,” said
Dolores Ramos, the boy’s grandmother, “because we don’t like the
taste of boiled water.”
Benitez told the parents to just wait. “With IV, I think he’ll
respond.” As they hung their heads, she added: “We could prevent
these.”
Polluted water hurts people in countless ways. Typhoid and cholera
flare regularly. Waterborne parasites cause onchocerciasis –
“river blindness.” Other parasites contribute to malnutrition.
And everywhere, girls give their lives to the chore of hauling
water for their families.
Miriam Garcia, 13, and her friends recently balanced 20-pound water
buckets on their heads along the Guaymitas River on the outskirts
of El Progresso, an industrial boomtown in northern Honduras. They
had to quit school after third grade.
“My mother doesn’t come to get water because her hip hurts, so I
am the only one who comes,” Garcia said.
The girls bathe, wash clothes and play in the river – within a mile
of family shanties. Diarrhea and headaches are the norm.
Doctors at public clinics “only pay attention to those who have
money,” Garcia said. “We all have parasites in our stomachs.”
Population growth erases gains
For three decades, leaders of rich countries have vowed to help the
world’s water have-nots.
The United Nations, which declared the 1980s “The Decade of
Water,” again has put water at the top of its global agenda. After
last year’s U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg, South Africa, U.N. leaders set a goal to halve the
proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and
sanitation by 2015.
Yet “the water situation worldwide is distressing and not
improving noticeably,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, president of the
Denver-based American Water Works Association, a leading group of
water professionals.
Part of the challenge is that deaths caused by contaminated water –
unlike deaths from earthquakes or hurricanes – are “a persistent,
growing problem,” said John Halpern, senior water supply and
sanitation adviser for the World Bank. Politically, it’s hard to
get governments to focus on such problems because they don’t seem
as urgent even if the consequences are huge, Halpern said.
And gains have been nullified by population growth in the most
severely afflicted countries across Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
Finally, lenders who could supply the billions needed for urban
water systems turn away because governments in poor countries often
can’t or won’t pay bills.
Meanwhile, villages like Candelaria – population 1,500 – are so
scattered that only small-scale solutions are feasible. Grassroots
nonprofit aid groups are the best hope for villagers, Halpern
said.
“The rich world needs to be involved. In pure economic terms,
growth in these countries is what’s going to help grow the world
economy. The industrialized countries including the United States
need somebody to sell goods and services to. Most of the population
lives in the developing world and will live increasingly in the
developing world.”
A debate among water experts also stalls action.
The issue is whether corporations should control water. In the
mid-1990s, corporations backed by the World Bank began installing
and operating water systems in needy countries – for profit, with
the view that charging for water is essential to allocate it
efficiently. People in rich countries generally pay for their
water, though rates often are lower than in poor countries where
water is scarce. Critics argue that water essential for life
shouldn’t be privately controlled.
“There has to be strong government oversight and protection of the
public good,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific
Institute, a water policy research center.
While the debate rages, children die. Anger grows.
“The U.S. response, in particular, has been inadequate. Our
contribution to water projects internationally is pathetically low.
It’s a tiny fraction of the aid we give, which itself is a tiny
fraction of what’s needed,” Gleick said.
“If this problem got the attention it deserves, we could eliminate
deaths from water-related diseases. But we seem to do better at
dealing with short-term crises. It’s more upsetting to us when a
plane crashes than when 6,000 kids died yesterday, and today, and
will die again tomorrow from preventable water-related diseases.”
For a few years, Honduras stood out among water-poor countries
because it did get some serious attention in 1998 following
Hurricane Mitch. The death and destruction – concentrated in the
north where U.S. corporations Chiquita and Dole for decades have
run banana plantations – drew more than $1 billion in emergency
aid. The United States gave more than $145 million.
Hurricane aid helped town
The aid paid for CH2M Hill, the Denver-based engineering firm, to
install $3 million worth of water supply and sanitation systems,
mostly in northern cities near the plantations and new factories.
Now in La Lima, population 70,000, healthy children play soccer
beneath red tanks that supply purified water.
The water immediately improved lives of thousands who lacked access
before, said caretaker Gilberto Nunez, 40, a father of two, who was
watering Llama del Bosque trees recently at the base of one tank.
“We don’t have the shortages we had before. People are really
satisfied,” Nunez said. “Before, they had to walk far and carry
their water. We were always working to get water.”
CH2M Hill sent engineer Leda Amador, who grew up in Honduras, to
coordinate work at the local level – including the delicate matter
of convincing low-income residents to pay for treated water piped
to their homes.
Incomes here, as across much of the world, are generally less than
$500 a year. And newcomers flocking from rural areas for factory
work often bristle at the notion of paying for water. Sometimes
they refuse.
“The question is whether the poor can pay,” Amador said. “I
think they can. If you figure what their other options are – what
they pay to buy water from private water trucks or to buy water in
bottles – it’s more than what they would pay for (municipal) water
service.”
Amador teamed with leaders of neighborhood “patronata” self-help
associations to explain plans. City officials backed her up,
cutting off service when people didn’t pay. Rates were set on a
sliding scale to help the poor. A typical family pays $7 a month.
But now Honduras’ hurricane money has run out. CH2M Hill is closing
its office. And, as in other poor countries, hundreds of thousands
of Hondurans – the population is growing by 3.2 percent a year –
still lack access to safe water.
The United States “must continue helping, because in poor
countries, we don’t have the capability to build up our water
systems because it’s too expensive,” said Mayor Nelly Soliman of
El Progresso, population 200,000. “Always, the policy has been,
the richer countries should help the poorer countries. This is a
severe problem for us.”
U.S. officials say the most children die in rural areas, where 36
percent of Hondurans lack water. “I’d like to put more in. It is
needed,” said Paul Tuebner, USAID’s director in Honduras.
“Have you ever hauled water daily for 2 miles on your head up and
down mountains? … We have studies that show, once we put in a water
system, infant mortality goes down.”
The anger that has led to riots over water has erupted here, too.
Last March, 1,500 protesters riled about water targeted roads in a
northern industrial area where they knew they might get attention.
They blocked traffic around new “maquila” factories where, for
about $50 a month, workers make Fruit of the Loom, Wrangler, Tommy
Hilfiger and other garments for U.S. consumers.But Honduras’ rural
poor traditionally are peaceful. And in Candelaria, villagers
preferred a practical approach.
They’ve designed a water system that would pipe water from a spring
to spigots at family compounds.
A few years ago, they bought pipes and laid them, with dozens of
men contributing free labor. But the pipes burst. Local engineers
had failed to allow for pressure changes as water whooshed up and
down hills. Now, with help from different engineers, village
leaders have modified their plan and are looking for a better kind
of pipe.
Some villagers are hopeful. Maria Garcia and Reyes Gomez are
impatient after their son’s death.
Gomez now plans to emigrate to the United States. Friends who have
managed to sneak into the country send home money that lets their
families live comfortably in La Esperanza.
Working abroad “would be harder. This is my father’s land. I
learned to grow crops from my father. This is the natural way for
me to earn my living,” Gomez said. But potato and banana crops
don’t pay. His wife, Maria, is too busy hauling water to work in a
sewing cooperative.
So Gomez talks of borrowing $1,300 to hire a smuggler to guide him
north. There are alligators in the river along the U.S.-Mexico
border, he said. “That’s what I’m scared of, and maybe somebody
will kill me.”
If he gets through, his first earnings will pay off his lender, he
said. “Then I could help my family.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
American Water Works Association (Based in Denver):
….www.awwa.org; 303-734-3410
….www.water4people.org; 303-734-3476; ….303-734-3494
World Vision, aid contacts in La Esperanza, Honduras:
….Cesar_zelaya@wvi.org
….Region_intibuca@wvi.org
….honduras@wvi.org
Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif.- based water research center
that publishes the biennial survey “The World’s Water”:
www.pacinst.org
USAID, a government humanitarian agency: www.usaid.gov
World Bank, an international finance organization:
www.worldbank.org
HONDURAS
Population: 6,669,789
Median age: 18.8 years
Population growth rate: 3.2 percent
Infant mortality rate: 29.96 deaths per 1,000 live births
Life expectancy at birth: 66.65 years
Fertility rate: 4.07 children born per woman (2003 estimate)
Literacy rate: 76.2 percent (those 15 and over who can read and
write)
Population below poverty line: 53 percent (1993 estimate)
Unemployment rate: 28 percent (2002 estimate)
Sources: Denver Post research,
CIA Factbook
June 26, 1996 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment, Water
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.”
April 9, 1995 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment, Grand Canyon, Water
LAVA FALLS, Ariz. – America’s beloved natural wonder, the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River, isn’t natural any more.
It looks better than ever. New vegetation growing along the
river supports a wildlife paradise with trout, bald eagles and
an endangered bird and snail. The layered cliffs still soothe
city dwellers trying to escape earthly woes.
But now a decade-long, $60 million series of government
studies reveals ecology and geology out of whack. Initial
changes caused by the Glen Canyon hydroelectric dam, completed
in 1963, set off a chain of subtler changes that are remaking
the Grand Canyon.
Alien species of insects, plants, fish and birds are invading
the river corridor. Avalanches of mud and rocks – crashing from
the Grand Canyon’s 529 side canyons – clog currents that once
had the power to blow through debris. (Storm-born debris closed
parts of Grand Canyon National Park in March, ripping through
trails and the main water pipeline to tourist camps at the
bottom of the canyon.)
The changes are driving a debate over dam operations and the
possibility of artificially restoring balance in the altered
Grand Canyon. When U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt decides
this year among various proposals for the canyon’s fate, his
Grand Canyon policy will set a precedent for wilderness
nationwide. On the Colorado River alone are 10 federal dams.
Scientists say the dams are remaking river corridors.
“”In 90 years of building dams, we never used to look at
downstream impacts,” said Dan Beard, head of the Bureau of
Reclamation. “”Those days are over.”
Anyone in the West who uses electricity and water depends at
least indirectly on the Grand Canyon. That guarantees political
pressure to maximize power and control the flow of the Colorado
River.
In Colorado, Gov. Roy Romer’s administration is blocking a
federal project to revitalize the Grand Canyon by simulating
natural floods. Officials in Colorado, where the river begins as
rivulets at the Continental Divide, sided with power merchants
opposing the floods.
The power merchants, with annual revenues of $110 million,
say releasing water for a simulated flood would cost about $3
million in lost potential sales. Colorado and other high-growth
states oppose letting water flow freely toward California. They
want to keep as much water as they can.
“”We’ve altered the Grand Canyon river corridor forever, and
we’re never going to put it back unless we take all the dams
out,” says JimLochhead, Romer’s director of natural resources.
“”We think some touching up can be done. But it needs to be done
within our operating rules for the river.”
The problems go back 32 years, when the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation plugged the Colorado River at the top of the Grand
Canyon with the 710-foot-tall Glen Canyon hydroelectric dam. The
dam changed natural processes. It ended floods that scoured the
canyon about every two years. It replaced the Colorado’s wildly
fluctuating flows. It turned the Colorado’s ruddy color a
picturesque green, because the dam traps 60 million tons of
sediment that used to flow down every year. It shifted the
Colorado’s temperature range from 32 to 82 degrees to a
narrower, cooler 46 to 50 degrees, because there’s no longer any
silt to absorb the sun’s heat.
These changes triggered the sweeping subtler changes
scientists are documenting today. For example, cooler water
favors bass and trout (and eagles that eat trout) at the expense
of endangered native fish such as the humpback chub.
Dam builders say they never anticipated the subtler changes.
Now even power producers are concerned about remaking nature’s
Mona Lisa.
“”We can’t be singularly focused on just generating power;
the Grand Canyon is a special place,” says Ken Maxey, manager
for the Western Area Power Administration, a federal energy
agency based in Golden. It sells power generated at the dam to
millions of people across the West.
Nature periodically reshaped the Grand Canyon more radically
in the past. The question is how far man wants to go. Scientists
say it’s possible to restore balance to the Grand Canyon by
mimicking nature.
“”We now know enough to take better care of the canyon,”
says Bob Webb of the U.S. Geological Survey. He has become one
of the government’s top scientists, the charismatic leader of
dozens of canyon missions.
Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are discussing various dam
flow regimens that might suit recreationists, power merchants
and the few endangered species. The leading proposal would
control river level fluctuations caused by adjusting dam
turbines to meet power demand.
There’s also a plan to heat the Colorado River south of the
dam. Bureau of Reclamation engineers would attach huge concrete
vents to the dam and pull warmer water from the reservoir
surface, instead of cooler deep water, through dam turbines.
Critics are skeptical, but few howl anymore about boycotting
power or blowing up the dam.
Environmentalists readily acknowledge the difficulty of
mimicking natural floods: Water let through the dam, unlike
natural river water, carries no silt. This hungry water erodes
beaches as it tries to pick up silt downriver.
“”There’s no way you’re going to get the Grand Canyon back the
way it was,” says Charles Van Riper of the National Biological
Service. “”Ignorance is bliss.”
The Grand Canyon still awes more than 5 million visitors a
year. In a recent Bureau of Reclamation survey, citizens said
they are willing to pay more money, in the form of higher
electricity rates or taxes, to preserve the Grand Canyon.
“”If you don’t keep some natural places intact, then you
won’t know what good is,” says Larry Stevens, one of the
government’s leading canyon ecologists. “”We can alter the
course of evolution. How much do you want to alter the future of
life on this planet? How much do you want to alter the future
not only of humans but all life?”
April 9, 1995 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment, Grand Canyon, Water
LAVA FALLS, Ariz. – Nobody expected trouble approaching camp
above Lava Falls, despite the heavy rain. Change in the Grand
Canyon is supposed to happen slowly over millions of years.
Bob Webb of the United States Geological Survey, wearing a
battered green Arizona Feeds cap, jumped off the first raft. He
tied up around a tamarisk shrub with three half-hitch knots.
After helping unload, he ambled through resinous creosote and
piercing barrel cactus toward the mouth of Prospect Canyon, one
of the Grand Canyon’s 529 side canyons, which opens into Lava
Falls.
The side canyons are steep enough to hurl thousands of tons
of debris – sandy mud, gravel, rocks, and boulders the size of
houses – at deadly speeds. Debris flows helped form the 161
rapids in the Grand Canyon. The Chinese refer to such flows as
dragons. A debris flow can recarve a side canyon, create a new
rapid or even plug the river in minutes.
At Lava Falls, rocks and lava from dormant volcanoes have
blocked the Colorado River before. Eventually, the river always
pushed through the debris. Every two years on average the
Colorado would flood, and up to 20 times the normal volume of
water (sometimes more than 200,000 cubic feet per second) would
tear through the Grand Canyon, purging the river corridor as
determinedly as a forest fire eating through overgrown woods.
But that was before the Glen Canyon Dam. Now the river is
weaker.
At the mouth of Prospect Canyon, Webb looked up at perched
boulders the size of snowplows. Loose rocks and mud had piled
up. Prospect Canyon hadn’t blown since 1963. The dragon was due
for a visit.
“This canyon is like a loaded gun,” Webb said.
The next day, it rained again. Three members of Webb’s team
climbed up Prospect Canyon through a fine mist. Peter Griffiths
needed sediment samples from the top. He’s trying to develop a
model for predicting debris flows with an eye to protecting
tourists camping along the river. John Elliott, a hydrologist
from USGS in Denver, studies debris flows throughout the West.
Surveying expert Steve Eudaley, also a mountaineer, came along
for the climb.
Boulders and ledges shone cold and slippery. It was so quiet
that the tap of a wedding ring echoed. The men groped for holds,
trudging through soaked talus, gaining about 1,000 feet. Finally
they reached jagged, lava-coated spines above a waterfall, the
blackened headwall where Prospect Canyon’s dragon sleeps.
A rock fell, like a bomb in the mist. Its cold slap
reverberated off sandstone cliffs.
Later in camp, rain fell harder. The wind picked up. Tents
were leaking, causing sleeping bags to lose some of their
warmth. As the scientists played cards at dusk, they talked
about warmth, conserving food supplies, whether roads above the
rim were washing out. Through static on the shortwave radio,
Webb heard forecasts predicting at least one more day of rain.
Around midnight, the wind knocked over tables and tarps,
scattering kitchen supplies except for a squat heavy blender.
Webb staggered out of his tent by the river, catching glimpses
of the wreckage in the beam of his headlamp. He shook his head
and went back inside.
An hour or so later, there was a faint trickling sound, as if
something was squeezing water out of the ground. The pitch of
the cascading water in Lava Falls rapids changed. Not higher or
lower. Different.
NO tree is safe in the Grand Canyon’s wild side canyons. No
campsite or fish pond survives forever.
In contrast, much of the Grand Canyon’s main river corridor,
away from the side canyons, seems tame as a Disneyland ride. Man
did the taming – damming the river to provide power and water –
which created cooler, regulated currents starved of silt.
Scientists are just now discovering the sweeping effects.
This presents a dilemma. We can let past, man-caused changes
take their course in the Grand Canyon. It still looks beautiful.
Or we can try to correct imbalances.
This winter, Webb and his scientists ran the river on a
mission to help confront this dilemma. They focused on the
invasion by alien species and effects of debris flows on the
weakened river south of the Glen Canyon Dam.
When the government built the Glen Canyon Dam 32 years ago,
federal officials knew itwould create a huge pond – Lake Powell
– that would inundate places a handful of visitors had compared
to cathedrals. But nobody expected an overhauled ecology or that
debris flows would overwhelm a weakened river down from the dam.
Like a child damming silt in the gutter after a storm, the
government has found that one intrusion on the natural system
leads to another.
“”Now debris flows from side canyons are getting the best of
the nation’s fifth biggest river,” says Webb.
The floor of the Grand Canyon may be rising, instead of
growing deeper as it did for more than five million years, he
says.
Webb’s team has traveled from side canyon to side canyon for
nearly a decade, documenting past debris flows, measuring how
much each one constricted the river. A river-running industry
that generates $20 million a year wants to know. The scientists
often joked during their arduous climbs about being caught in a
debris flow. “”It would be great, if you survived,” Griffiths
said. “”You could get data right away.”
The team also is scrutinizing new life appearing in the
canyon. Several native fish are gone – the Colorado squawfish,
roundtail chub, bonytail chub and razorback sucker – replaced by
brown trout and striped bass. The river otter is gone. Some
midges are disappearing, government ecologist Larry Stevens
says. Biting flies, poison ants (red harvester ants), cowbirds
and great-tailed grackles are increasing. Prolific plants such
as ravenna grass, camelthorn and tamarisk are crowding out
native plants such as willows. There are more plants in general
because there are no floods to wash them away.
Another team, led by Stevens, recently completed two 13-day
expeditions to remove ravenna grass by digging it up with
shovels. A few years ago, ravenna seeds blew into the canyon
after a National Park Service ranger planted some around the dam
visitor center. The seeds spread throughout the canyon, taking
hold aggressively in the shade of other plants, then growing
rapidly into reddish bunches of grass up to 12 feet high.
“”If you allow ravenna grass to take over, it will shape the
rest of the ecosystem,” Stevens says. He and his six-member
team dug out more than 4,500 clumps.
Webb’s team has matched more than 1,000 photos taken along
the river corridor before the dam with current photos. The
paired photos show very little change in vegetation between 1869
and 1963, when the Glen Canyon Dam plugged the river. After 1963
the results are dramatic.
Today’s lush canyon beckons like an oasis where, in the old
days, leafless trees jutted horizontally downriver as if frozen
in the middle of a hurricane. Back then, driftwood bent
Daliesque around boulders. Mud splotches dotted rocks in the
wake of fierce floods.
This winter’s trip, which has led to the Lava Falls rapids,
may be the last for a while. Political battles in Washington,
D.C., are beginning. The clock may be ticking for environmental
research. Intellectuals are reconsidering the virtues of the
artificial and the natural. This three-week expedition started
just below the dam at Lees Ferry and followed the river 240
miles. During those weeks, a team of diverse specialists began
to grasp how Americans are remaking one of the world’s biggest
natural wonders.
Feb. 21, 1995
NINE government scientists, led by Webb, leave Flagstaff at
dawn. They ride along the south rim of the Grand Canyon in a
white bus, full of questions and energy. The bus passes a
billboard advertising “”Everybody’s Authentic Trading Post.”
They head for two motorized rubber rafts at Lees Ferry.
They’ll load the rafts with nearly a ton of food, winter
equipment scrunched into water-tight bags, and
industrial-strength rain gear. The river banks sometimes are icy
in winter, too cold for a wet suit. Webb’s rule for preparing to
negotiate these canyons and white-water torrents: “”Pretend you
are playing in front of a freezing fire hose.”
Some odd stuff protrudes from a trailer towed by the bus:
five plastic pink flamingos, eight lawn chairs, a
battery-powered loudspeaker for Dick Dale’s surf guitar music
(“”Unknown Territory”), and a black skull-and-crossbones flag.
Everybody on the bus has a weakness for wildness. They talk
of impending floods on central Arizona’s Verde River. The more
the crew can learn about the Grand Canyon, they believe, the
better the odds of keeping it healthy.
They are psyched for three weeks of camping on the Colorado
River banks, awakening to the smell of cook Meg Viera’s coffee
at 6 a.m., running rapids, and climbing side canyons to collect
sediment samples, survey past debris flows, study plants, and
match photos from seemingly impossible locations that test
rock-climbing skills. Rain or shine, the data collection will
continue until boatman Kenton “”Factor” Grua blows his conch
shell at dusk.
Near the front of the bus, Webb hunches over a reconnaissance
photo from a 1952 trip. He thrives on the road. He lives almost
half his life away from his wife, an emergency delivery room
nurse, in Tucson. His eyesight is failing, so he leans close to
the photo, picking out details.
The photo shows a typical early canyon scene: murky water
coursing through a barren corridor. Boulders the size of
Cadillacs litter the banks. Sand has piled up against the rocks.
There aren’t many plants in 1952, because they can’t survive the
seasonal flooding and scorching summer droughts.
Webb focuses on two rocks sticking up from a sandy beach by
Badger Rapids. One rock is the size of a dinner plate, the other
is as big as a treasure chest. Then he points to a tiny tamarisk
shrub.
“”You’ll see our problem at this site,” he says. The site is
the first camp, about 8 miles downriver from Lees Ferry.
The bus stops near some Navajo hogans below Echo Cliffs. On
Sept. 8, 1994, a debris flow tore down from the cliffs, across
the road here, and careened down Jackass Creek into the river,
pinching Badger Rapids.
USGS researcher Mimi Murov and photographer Dominick
Oldershaw leave the bus here to follow the path of the debris
flow down to the river. Webb wants a photo looking down on the
site from the rim, replicating an earlier photo. He and the
others – Ted Melis and Elliott of USGS, Griffiths of the
University of Arizona, Eudaley, photographer Steve “”Special
Agent” Tharnstrom, park ranger Marker Marshall, Viera and
boatmen Grua and Bob Grusy – will pick them up at Badger Rapids.
They hike across Marble Plateau, until the canyon opens like
a giant geode. The beachshown in the photograph is there, though
the sand bars seem smaller than in the photo. There are many
more plants.
Up on the rim, there’s garbage. This is where car companies
take photos of vehicles for advertisements, where movie crews
film stuntmen hanging out over the canyon. There are oil cans,
beer cans and shards of a shattered mirror glittering in the dirt.
The scientists climb down Jackass Canyon. It dips and bends
like a melted stove pipe, almost vertical at points, plunging
down 1,000 feet to the green river. The debris flow last fall
smoothed the reddish sandstone.
A dead cow’s bones, picked clean by ravens, disintegrate in
the gully. The tilted head, looking up the creek, suggests the
cow died in the avalanche of rocks and mud.
Webb and crew already are surveying the site when Murov and
Oldershaw arrive at midafternoon. Webb is wearing a festive
necktie with his T-shirt.
“”This is the smallest I’ve ever seen these sand bars,” he
says, sounding slightly troubled.
Webb points out the two rocks he had pinpointed in the 1952
photo, rocks that appeared about the size of a dinner plate and
a treasure chest. Today, they are huge, the size of tugboats. It
is dramatic evidence of sand erosion; the uncovered rocks
remained while the Colorado’s hungry water, starved of silt, has
eaten away at the beaches.
Webb points out other changes. Rocks from the debris flow
have spilled into the rapids. Blood-red tamarisk stalks are
thickening everywhere. They crowd out willows on the wet river
banks, as roots suck up river water. A single tamarisk produces
10,000 seeds. A tamarisk seed falling on wet sand can sink roots within a
month. Native desert plants aren’t as prolific.
Elliott and Griffiths inspect rocks. Tharnstrom matches
photos of the rapids. Murov strolls past thickets of shrubs.
Eudaley and Melis use electronic surveying equipment to plot
contours of the sediment deposited by the debris flow.
Webb supervises, ambling around like a gunslinger with a look
of mild consternation.
“”I look at this river now, this river does not represent
wilderness,” he says. “”It is not a natural system anymore.”
Feb. 22
ABOUT 18 miles into the journey, the team stops at a side canyon
where, on July 24, 1987, limestone boulders hurtled 300 feet
from overhead cliffs, unearthing a layer of loose shale, which
all gained momentum and buried a popular beach. It was a
relatively minor debrisflow, yet it narrowed the Colorado River
by 10 meters. A 1984 photo shows a sandy beach with room for 25
tents. The debris flow hit on one of three nights that month
when the beach happened to be unoccupied by rafters.
“”Nobody’s been killed yet by one of these debris flows,”
Melis says as he gazes through the lens nicknamed “”Idi Amin” –
the EDM, or electronic distance measuring scope. “”The use is so
high in the summer that it’s just a matter of time.”
Feb. 23
SOME scientists speak scathingly of “”Disneyland Diversity.”
They hate the idea of “”virtual wilderness” (nature remade to
amuse people on vacation). Many want to preserve and protect
wilderness that remains, as opposed to managing a naturalistic
garden.
Who’s to say whether today’s altered Grand Canyon is better
than the way it was before?
Bald eagles and ducks hover overhead as the rafts enter a
verdant channel. We are going to Crash Canyon, a side canyon 62
miles down from Lees Ferry, named for the 1956 commercial
airliner crash that dropped dozens of dead bodies into the canyon.
In old photos this is flood-beaten land. But today in the
absence of floods, plants multiply. Talus sliding from side
canyons, backing up the river here and there, has created pools
of calm water. Marshes are forming around these pools.
The quacking ducks flap up and down the river banks. Wildlife
teems – heron, coyotes, deer, bighorn sheep, bobcats, ringtailed
cats. Trout and striped bass swim in sunlit green pools. Above,
two bald eagles perch on a cliff. Once threatened, eagles in the
Grand Canyon now thrive on non-native trout and bass.
A thousand feet below the canyon rim, a helicopter clacks;
inside are park service rangers counting eagles. Next year,
federal biologists plan to introduce some of the condors
raisedat a cost of $25 million in California.
Webb stops at Vasey’s Waterfall – spring-fed froth spraying
from a hole in a red limestone cliff. The water feeds two acres
of wetland populated by monkey flowers, watercress, maidenhair
fern, poison ivy, redbud and coyote willow. Biologists who
stopped here in 1991 found the Kanab
ambersnail. It’s a dull gray snail, stuck to a yellowish shell
no longer than three-fourths of an inch.
Webb sees no Kanab snails. Because the snail is endangered,
the government is supposed to make sure nothing happens that
could hurt it. Nobody really knows what could hurt it, except
that floods might wash it away, an argument Colorado officials
use in opposing simulated floods to revitalize the canyon.
“”The snail in the canyon is an ecological indicator of the
health of the canyon,” says Jim Lochhead, Gov. Romer’s director
of natural resources. “”It needs to be protected.”
Webb’s question is: Should we worry about a snail the size of
a pencil eraser when floods could help the whole canyon?
Even among government scientists, the Endangered Species Act
reeks of dizzy romanticism. Life in the canyon evolves, the
scientists say. Extinction is natural. Taking care of the canyon
shouldn’t mean prolonging a moment in evolution at the expense
of the canyon. The scientists call for a more flexible
Endangered Ecosystems Act. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
director Mollie Beattie has called for the same.
“”A lot of the problems come down to single species
management,” Webb says. “”You focus on a single tree and forget
about the forest. But the species act does more good than
damage, because the rate of extinction is so high. We need to
have something in place.”
Throughout the canyon, dozens of park service rangers endure
an often thankless job enforcing intricate rules to keep the
canyon idyllic. They hack out thorny thickets on eroding
beaches, and plant trees along worn trails.
In summer, the canyon gets heavy use. The park service is
planning parking lots and wilderness trails to accommodate an
additional 2 million tourists a year on the canyon rim. Park
rangers police 22,000 people who run the river on rafts every
year, trying to keep them from loving it to death. Most of the
rules make sense: River runners must haul out all waste,
including human excrement. No golfing is allowed, since falling
rocks are enough of a hazard for most campers. Sometimes the
rangers get carried away, like the time one reportedly ticketed
a commercial cook for baking a cake in a Dutch oven, citing her
for “”scorched sand.”
Park managers try to restrain airplane and helicopter pilots
hauling tourists over the canyon, requiring them to fly above
the rim. It’s harder to control the air pollution pouring into
the canyon from Los Angeles and Las Vegas (visibility has been
reduced to half what it was in the 1950s), and sewage washing in
from Page.
“”In the summer, this place feels like a country club,” says
Viera, a soft-haired woman with a kind face who orchestrates
several commercial trips a year.
“”The idea of wilderness is pretty much lost,” she says,
referring to summer crowds along the river. She confesses that
the difference between the real canyon and the altered version
sometimes seems confusing. The canyon still looks beautiful. If
you’re not happy here, something’s wrong, she figures. Sometimes
she questions whether scientific knowledge actually will help to
preserve the Grand Canyon. “”It’s been studied to death,” she
says.
Feb. 26
WEBB wants to pick up the pace. He feels an urgent need to
document as many changes as possible in the vegetation and
contours here, a mile below the south rim’s Comanche Point, at
the base of the Tanner side canyon.
But today Webb is sick with a virus. He can’t keep food down,
has to get out of the sun. He abandons a pile of rocks he’s been
studying and closes his notebook. He scuffs at a clump of bromus
tectorum, commonly known as cheat grass, associated with
overgrazing, that has found its way into the canyon.
“”It’s another invasive plant that is taking over the world,
and there’s not much we can do about it, because we don’t
understand it. It gets really dense, and it crowds out
everything else.”
Webb heads for camp, pausing at a gnarled black mesquite
tree. The mesquite tree had grown up amid floods; it’s been
marooned here, high and dry, by the regulated river that favors
the cheat grass.
Meanwhile, Webb’s crew fans out across the snout of a debris
flow that crashed down on Aug. 22, 1993, after an intense
thunderstorm. The 7,500 cubic meters of debris constricted the
river by about a third, increasing the severity of Tanner
rapids, creating pools upriver that nourish new marshes.
Melis works the Idi Amin. He’s a meticulous scientist. His
tent is dirt-free and he carefully transfers surveying data onto
a laptop computer every evening.
As Melis gazes through the scope, he sums up his thoughts.
“”The river used to rule,” he says. “”Now the side canyon
tributaries have the upper hand. They probably will … as long
as the dam is there.”
He looks through the scope as he speaks, and the scope shoots
a laser beam at three-way prisms mounted on poles held by Murov
and Eudaley. “”Rivers are meant to move sediment from high
points to the oceans. That’s what this river used to do for a
living: move sediment. That’s been disrupted. I lament that.”
As he speaks, a hiker approaches, wearing a purple shirt,
black shorts and white Stan Smith sneakers. It is Tom Deeds, 47,
a potato farmer from Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Deeds last
visited this part of the Grand Canyon as a college student. He’s
been hiking the backcountry for 10 days.
“Walking along here, it feels like this river needs to be
flushed,” Deeds says.
“”There is no authentic nature anymore,” he says, meaning
nature not touched by human activity. He says he’s not bothered
by the change in water color as much as pollution.
Back in camp, Webb lies in front of his tent with a fever of
101.8, while Tharnstrom and Oldershaw sift through old photos
they still need to match.
“”Everybody loves a zoo,” Webb says. “”Is that really what
we want from our national park system? If any place should be
unspoiled, shouldn’t be a zoo, the Grand Canyon is it.”
Feb. 27
ABOUT 4 miles downriver from Tanner Canyon sits a silvery green
and gold marsh fed by Cardenas Creek. This is where biologists
have spotted endangered southwestern willow flycatcher birds.
It’s early in the year to see one; flycatchers winter in Central
America. But this marsh is probably the only place in the West
where you could see one. The flycatchers live here in willows,
also innon-native tamarisks. Male flycatchers cruise the marsh
grasses nipping flies that they carry back to females in nests
shaped like oversized coffee mugs.
The marsh is closed during parts of the summer. Hidden park
service cameras monitor the place. A simulated flood, carrying
hungry water from Lake Powell to flush the Grand Canyon, might
wipe out flycatcher homes.
“”It’s actually a pretty nondescript little bird,” Factor
says. Murov tries to imitate their trill: “”Fitz-bew!”
The marsh isn’t natural, and the river naturally wants to
erode the area, Webb says. “”This bird’s habitat is artificial.
It all seems real sketchy to me.”
March 1
AN icy rainstorm pelts the raft as we slide out of Bedrock
Rapid, past swelling pools, and drift toward Tapeats Beach for a
photo match. Tharnstrom decides to shoot it despite the rain. We
tie up, and clamber along river banks covered with slippery
rocks, tamarisks and green clumps of grass.
The 1952 photo shows a sunny, sandy beach scene. Women are
seated. A wooden dorrie marked Mexican Hat is tied up where we
stand today. The beach then was known as a party paradise where
people enjoyed driftwood bonfires and fished.
A lean man in the foreground of the photo, Bobb Rigg, walks
happily through the sand. He is a pilot who set the river speed
record in 1951, guiding a dorrie 276.5 miles from Lees Ferry to
Lake Mead in 38 hours. (The record held until 1983 when Factor
and two friends made the trip in just under 37 hours without
stopping at night.)
Today Rigg, 64, hardly recognizes Tapeats Beach.
“”Before you had the sand, and driftwood,” Rigg said in an
interview from his home in Anchorage, Alaska. He works as an FAA
flight surgeon and an eye doctor.
“”You could sit in the water. You spent a lot of time in the
water because it was refreshing, and warm. We’d been exposed to
the river since we were kids. We’d lived by the Colorado River
up in Grand Junction. It was an escape for people who had been
in the war, including my brother. There was this awesome silence
in the canyon.”
Rigg votes Republican. He doesn’t consider himself an
environmentalist. But he says the government is making huge,
greedy mistakes that degrade the Grand Canyon.
“”What’s more important, higher energy prices or maintaining
nature’s balance? You’re talking about the normal God-created
course of the Grand Canyon. Who cares what some bureaucrats
think?”
Like Rigg, many of the men who pioneered the river-running
industry before the dam say they are deeply saddened by man’s
unexpected changes. Before 1946, only about 100 people had run
the Colorado River. Last fall, Webb invited survivors for a trip
designed to evoke memories and record them, a test for
scientific conclusions.
One boatman, 92-year-old Frank Wright, refused to go. Wright
ran the river starting in 1948. His last trip was in 1957.
“”I have certain personal feelings about the river,” Wright
says from his home in Blanding, Utah. “”Have you had an
experience where you don’t want to see some things again?”
But other men and women did go. A report on their
observations shows widespread agreement with observations by the
scientists: overhauled ecology and debris from side canyons
overwhelming the once-mighty river.
One was 73-year-old Les “”Buckethead” Jones. In 1962, Jones
ran the river in a 19-inch-wide, 16-foot-long metal kayak. He
paddled with a camera mounted on his helmet – a World War I
helmet shell. He compiled detailed backcountry maps and many of
the photos that Webb’s crew is matching on this trip.
“”I want to remember the river like it used to be,” Jones
says. “”Man’s architecture is never as good as nature’s.”
Scientists should still try to revitalize the canyon with
artificial floods, Jones says, questioning Colorado leaders’
refusal to let any water flow freely downriver.
As for new wildlife, eagles and condors may look beautiful,
he says, “”but any time you introduce something new, something
else in the canyon pays the price, usually the former
inhabitants.”
The old timers follow today’s debate among government
agencies. Each agency has an interest beyond the health of the
canyon. Fish and Wildlife wants steady flows that nurture
endangered species, but not big floods. The Park Service wants
steady flows that don’t change too fast, to protect rafters and
fishermen. The power producers want fluctuating flows tied to
urban demand for electricity, which generates money. The Bureau
of Reclamation is torn between building more dams and fixing dam
damage.
No agency puts the canyon first, the old timers say. They
feel the only way to do that is get rid of the dam.
“It was a big mistake,” says 92-year-old Wright.
Nobody plans to take down the dam before it wears out in 300
or more years. Anyway, there are 10 major federal dams
controlling the Colorado River, creating a succession of
reservoirs from Colorado’s Blue Mesa to Nevada’s Lake Mead. Even
without the Glen Canyon Dam, the river wouldn’t be wild and
still might not reach the Sea of Cortez.
At about 1:30 a.m. on March 6, muddy rainwater at the head of
Prospect Canyon unleashed boulders up to 7 feet wide. The
boulders hurtled downward like meteors at the river. They mixed
into a dark brown slurry. It sounded like a waterfall punctuated
with thuds. The slurry coarsed down in three furious pulses,
throwing up spiked torrents, churning and ripping out rocks and
mud and gravel.
After 32 years, Prospect Canyon was crashing while Webb’s
team slept at its base.
t the snout, rocks smacked like billiard balls, spilling
into the river. The big boulders settled. The slurry gained
momentum. It sprayed out a newly gouged gap atop the canyon with
the force of thousands of fire hoses.
From the top, this slurry fell 330 feet, pulverizing a cliff
where it hit, shooting out perpendicular from the cliff. Then
the muddy froth dropped 550 feet to the base of the waterfall,
where it drilled a hole 40 feet deep. The debris flow ultimately
moved an estimated 57,000 tons of mud and rocks. It cascaded
into the river for 18 hours. The dragon was cutting a new path.
A muddy mist hung in the air, almost too thick to breathe.
The scientists, in tents a quarter-mile away, didn’t hear it
at first.
At dawn, they went wild. Tourists might have been horrified.
But here, somebody was shouting “”Merry Christmas!” The
scientists rushed, tentatively at first, to glimpse the dragon’s
work.
“”We would have been toast,” Elliott said, staring at the
snout and up the canyon where he’d climbed the day before. Rocks
still were pouring into the Colorado River. They overpowered it.
This debris flow constricted the Colorado River by a third,
pinching off Lava Falls, one of America’s most treacherous rapids.
Getting through Lava Falls was always risky. Now the ledge
was sharper, and new whirlpools appeared around the black rock.
The slot at the top, which boatman Factor always aimed for, had
disappeared. The V waves were bigger, snapping like jaws where
rafts used to pass. It was likely dirt roads above the canyon
rim were washed out. There would be no way out for days. But
here at the bottom during the debris flow, Factor just focused
on the new Lava Falls. He envisioned his historic first run.
Meanwhile, Webb and Melis spread their arms to the sky and
danced. They whooped. In the middle of the destruction, they
reveled like children.
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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.
