Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
- This Raised My PulseHey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]
- Time for a Turnaround
- Edgy Veggie
Front Range thirst for Colo. River water leads to increasingly bizarre plans
The proposed Flaming Gorge Pipeline would pipe water from the Green Rvier in Wyoming to the Front Range.
The strategy sounds absurd.
But apparently, a plan to build a 400-mile pipeline to bring water from the Green River in Wyoming — curving north and east along Interstate 80 to Cheyenne before turning south — to thirsty cities on Colorado’s Front Range may become a reality.
The $3 billion pipeline would bring the water from the Green River — a tributary of the Colorado River — to growing cities from Fort Collins to Pueblo. The specifics of which towns want in on the Wyoming water hasn’t been released.
This from Sunday’s Denver Post:
Colorado’s quest for new water has gained urgency with a forecast projecting that the state’s population of 5 million will double to 10 million by 2050 — requiring as much as 1 million acre-feet a year of new water (about four times Denver’s current annual consumption).
South Denver’s high-consumption suburbs rely on pumping water from rapidly depleting aquifers as deep as 2,700 feet underground.
“Conservation is an important part, but conservation doesn’t make more water. We’re going to have to have more water. It’s going to have to be imported,” said Frank Jaeger, manager of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, who is leading the water suppliers’ discussions.
“I see this project as being the least intrusive of anything you could do,” Jaeger said. “Any water development is going to be expensive.”
This project, called the Flaming Gorge Pipeline, is just one of a handful of plans hatched on the Front Range to bring West Slope water over the continental divide.
Most every town and city in Boulder County gets drinking water from the Colorado River, and many of them — including Longmont, Lafayette, Erie, Louisville and Superior — are lobbying to get more through another diversion called the Windy Gap Firming Project.
Lake Powell in Utah is one of several massive Colorado River reservoirs in the West that may shrink due to global warming.
Even without taking more water out of the Colorado River Basin for Front Range folks, the river may have a harder time supplying water to the people who depend on it now, according to a study by the University of Colorado.
Researchers in Boulder found that the Colorado River system — which 30 million people depend on for drinking and irrigation water — could fully deplete all of its reservoir storage by the middle of the century.
Read more about this study in an article by Brittany Anas in the Daily Camera.
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