On July 1, the Blue River below Dillon was flowing at 221 cubic feet per second. On Aug. 5, it jumped up to 455 cfs. Nathan Elder, manager of water supply for Denver Water, explained that in the first week of August, the Blue River’s flow reached the 450 mark and has slowly declined since. On Tuesday, Aug. 10, it was 340 cfs, which he said is slightly above normal for this time of year.
Denver Water manages Dillon Reservoir, which the Blue River flows into and out of.
“We’re trying to match outflow with inflow and send that water downstream to Green Mountain Reservoir,” Elder said…
The increase in water to Green Mountain Reservoir is welcome, as the reservoir was over 50,000 acre-feet below normal in late July, and a downstream call for irrigation rights was placed on the reservoir. As of Aug. 11, the reservoir, which is full at about 154,000 acre-feet of water, was holding 100,243 acre-feet of water.
Summit County saw its wettest July in 10 years, which is what has contributed to the increase in outflow, Elder said. He noted that not only has the rain on the Western Slope helped, but rain on the Front Range has lowered water demands on that side of the Continental Divide. That has reduced the need to send water through Roberts Tunnel, which has kept more water in Dillon Reservoir and made way for the release of more water down the Blue River and into Green Mountain Reservoir…
Dillon Reservoir started out the year lower than normal, and less water flowed in from the melting snowpack. In late June, Elder reported that the reservoir was full but only because much less water was released from the reservoir to the Blue River than in an average year. The lack of water flowing into the Blue River meant two things: Less water went to Green Mountain Reservoir, and commercial rafting couldn’t happen on the river this year…
Goose Pasture Tarn. Photo credit: City of Breckenridge
As for the Goose Pasture Tarn, which is currently lowered due to the rehabilitation of the dam, Elder said the tarn’s water that is being stored in Dillon Reservoir has a “very small impact.” For context, the tarn is 771 acre-feet, whereas Dillon Reservoir is over 257,000. Once it’s time for the tarn to be refilled, it will be given priority for water rights.
Denver Water relies on a network of reservoirs to collect and store water. The large collection area provides flexibility for collecting water as some areas receive different amounts of precipitation throughout the year. Image credit: Denver Water.
Colorado water commissioners declined to upgrade water quality rules for the urban stretch of river, though conservation groups say they are finally being heard.
Public officials, conservation groups and citizen speakers pleaded with the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission [August 9, 2021] to reverse a 2020 decision and strengthen protections for the South Platte River in north Denver and Adams County, but the commissioners declined.
Opponents of the commission’s decision last year thought they had one last chance in a “town hall” feedback format to urge the commissioners to revisit the controversial vote, which rejected a staff recommendation to upgrade the South Platte to higher water quality protections. They pointed to the recent weeks of high heat and air pollution in metro Denver, as well as a new climate change report showing irrefutable and irreversible damage to the environment, as more reasons to protect the river with tougher regulations…
“We cannot wait five more years to upgrade or revisit what’s happening to the communities in north Denver,” said Ean Tafoya, Colorado director of the nonprofit GreenLatinos.
The commissioners, who are appointed by Gov. Jared Polis to oversee the Water Quality Control Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said they would not reverse their 2020 decision now. The coalition favoring more protections said after the town hall they would consider trying to force the commission to reconsider through a petition process, by taking legal action…
The Platte River plods through downtown Denver, a small workhorse with a big load. Photo/Allen Best
But some commissioners appeared to leave the door open to further discussions and to seek more community input on future river decisions…
Those who want to elevate the South Platte’s urban stretches used the commission’s town hall comment period to attack the 2020 decision. The staff of the water quality division last year had recommended that the South Platte River through north Denver and Adams County, long plagued by industrial releases and wastewater effluent, be upgraded to the next higher level of stream protections.
Metropolitan Wastewater Reclamation District Hite plant outfall via South Platte Coalition for Urban River Evaluation
The higher level would have forced existing polluters in that section, like Metro Wastewater, Suncor or Molson Coors, to avoid further degrading water quality with any new activity unless they could prove it was essential to their continuing business. As it stands now, those existing polluters have “protected use” status that permits them to degrade the water, even though water quality in those central urban streams has improved in recent decades.
The Colorado division of Parks and Wildlife, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Adams County Commissioners and others had supported the staff request for a river protection upgrade. The water commissioners rejected the idea last year, and then again in June.
Adams County Commissioner Steve O’Dorisio said he wanted to be frank with the water commissioners that not enough opponents were prepared for the discussion ahead of the 2020 decision.
“Back in 2020 we did not know how this specific decision would affect our river and our communities,” O’Dorisio said.
Jeff Neuman-Lee, describing himself as a citizen speaker for the town hall forum, pointed to Colorado’s air fouled by wildfire smoke and heat-generated ozone in recent weeks.
“We’ve been just degrading our Earth over and over and over again, and we can’t tolerate any more,” he said. “It’s depressing to see that we’re allowing water quality to go unheeded; to create stretches of our rivers and say we don’t care about them, we’re just going to let them go.”
[…]
Sunrise along the Clear Creek Trail August 12, 2021.
Some of Monday’s speakers said they were concerned that leaving the South Platte’s water quality protection where it is now will weaken the current permit renewal process underway for the Suncor refinery, which borders Sand Creek as it empties into the South Platte. The state health department is reviewing and answering public comments on Suncor’s permit application, and conservationists and neighborhood groups want Suncor’s water and air pollution caps cut way back.
“This idea of grandfathered legacy pollution,” Tafoya said, “just because they always have, doesn’t mean they should continue to.”
Officials in Lower Colorado River Basin states want to slow the decline of Lake Mead’s water levels over the next few years by paying Southern California farmers not to plant crops.
It’s not a plan that Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, considers a “drought buster,” but it will reduce lake level decline by up to 3 feet over the next three years, he said.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Central Arizona Water Conservation District have all approved an agreement for the plan. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has not yet signed the agreement, but Hasencamp said additional water is already being saved in the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Southern California.
The program comes as the Lower Colorado River Basin braces for the first federally declared water shortage in Lake Mead, a determination that should come Monday when the Bureau of Reclamation releases water level projections.
Under existing river agreements, Nevada, Arizona and Mexico will take cuts to their allocations of water next year…
The farms of the Palo Verde Valley draw water from the Colorado River. Visual: Dicklyon / Wikimedia Commons
Building on existing program
The new agreement between the federal government and water agencies in California, Nevada and Arizona builds on a 2004 agreement between the Metropolitan Water District and Palo Verde Irrigation District.
The original agreement allows the water district to pay farmers in the Palo Verde Irrigation District to temporarily not plant crops on portions of land. Water saved by not irrigating that farmland is then made available for urban use in Southern California.
Because the Metropolitan Water District’s water reserves are so high, the existing program is now operating at the minimum level outlined in the agreement, Hasencamp said.
That presented an opportunity to use the remaining capacity of the program to benefit Lake Mead. Hasencamp said he approached the other agencies participating in the program in May.
The Metropolitan Water District will continue to get water from Palo Verde at the minimum level outlined in the original agreement, but the difference between that and the total water savings under the new agreement will be banked in Lake Mead to slow the decline of water levels.
The federal government will pay for half of the program cost under the new agreement, with the three water districts splitting the rest.
Officials estimate the program could keep up to 180,000 acre-feet — equal to 60 percent of Nevada’s annual river water allocation — in the lake…
Lower Basin cooperation
Part of the significance of the agreement is the Palo Verde Irrigation District’s willingness to contribute some of its water to Lake Mead, said Chuck Cullom, manager of Colorado River programs for the Central Arizona Project…
Palo Verde will not contribute any more water than the maximum amount that was outlined in the original 2004 agreement.
Those gamboling across the tundra of Colorado’s high mountains this summer have been posting photographs of prolific wildflower displays to social media sites.
But what all has been happening up there beyond the dazzle?
It’s been warming, of course, like all other places. Research published in June has found that warming temperatures are causing plants to stay green longer and flower earlier. But their reproductive cycles are not responding in the same way.
A research team at the University of Colorado Boulder synthesized 30 years of experimental warming data from 18 different tundra sites, both in Arctic and Alpine areas, across the globe. What they found confounded simplistic explanations.
“This research shows how difficult it is to make broad-scale predictions about what’s going to happen with global climate change, because even with 30 years of data at 18 sites, there’s still very complex responses that are happening,” said Courtney Collins, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder and the lead author of the study that was published in Nature Communications.
The research included studies on Niwot Ridge, located in the Front Range of Colorado northwest of Boulder.
“The tundra is warming much more rapidly than other parts of the world. In some places, it’s happening at twice the rate of warming (of the rest of the globe), and so these changes are occurring extremely fast and they’re happening as we speak,” said Collins in a story issued by the university.
Warming of Arctic areas of permafrost had long worried climate scientists. As the Washington Post noted in a story this week, they call it the “methane bomb.” They worry about melting of the vast permafrost in Siberia. Photo credit: Peggy Williams via Big Pivots
“What we do know with quite a lot of confidence is how much carbon is locked up in the permafrost. It is a big number, and as the Earth warms and the permafrost thaws, that ancient organic matter is available to microbes for microbial processes, and that releases CO2 and methane,” said Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Holmes was consulted by the Washington Post’s Steven Mufson after a new report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about a surge of methane emissions from Siberia’s permafrost. This was a different source than expected. Thawing wetlands release microbial methane from the decay of soil and organic matter. Thawing limestone – or carbonate rock – releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from both below and within the permafrost.
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Surface temperatures during the heat wave in Siberia had soared to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the norms of the 20th century.
Holmes, the scientist, called the finding intriguing. “It’s not good news if it’s right. Nobody wants to see more potentially nasty feedbacks, and this is potentially one.”
In Colorado, temperatures have been rising for decades. A study conducted since the 1980s at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte has attempted to predict the future of mountain meadows with rising temperatures. The bottom line: more sagebrush, fewer wildflowers.
Also at Gothic, site of the outdoor laboratory, David Inouye studied wildflower blooms for decades. In 2014, he reported results of his 39 years of study. More than two-thirds of alpine flowers had changed their blooming patterns, he found. The blooming season that had formerly run from late May through early September now lasts from late April to late September.
The spring peak, when masses of wildflowers burst into bloom, had moved up by five days per decade, he found.
After almost two years of a horrific pandemic that’s killed almost 620,000 Americans and deadly, faster-spreading variants emerging because selfish and ignorant people refuse to get vaccinated — those of us who have tried to do everything right have no more f**ks left to give.
Anti-vaxxers, COVID conspiracy theorists and right-wing politicians have made the pandemic far more hellacious than it ever needed to be. We have been lectured endlessly by pundits and attention seekers on social media that we musn’t ever make them feel bad about their awful choices — no matter how many public, violent scenes they cause over health rules, heavily armed protests they organize to intimidate us and how much the death toll soars.
Their feelings have been deemed more important than the health and well-being of our families, because somehow if we kowtow to the worst people in our society, a few will supposedly be nice enough to get vaccinated or wear masks.
Nope.
Knuckle-draggers do not deserve veto power over our safety. The only way we will make COVID an occasional nuisance instead of a mortal threat to everyone’s health is with vaccine mandates for everything from school to concerts to travel.
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If you refuse to get vaccinated — and this goes double if you are someone with enough of a platform to influence others — you are to blame for the fourth wave. You are the reason why more children are being hospitalized, so spare me your family values bloviation. You are why good people who have done their part and gotten their shots are getting breakthrough cases.
I am tired of sugarcoating it. I am tired of the perennial hectoring to “both sides” the pandemic like we mindlessly do with political coverage.
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The 40% who can’t be bothered to get jabbed because they know more than doctors or they understand freedom better than the rest of us or just know that the magnetic 5G is gonna be injected in their veins are why people continue to needlessly die. And they are why life continues to be hell for the rest of us.
Yes, there is a political divide in vaccination rates — and Republicans are on the wrong side of it. Let’s stop denying the obvious or making excuses for a party whose pandemic response has been a mix of crass pandering to their base and sociopathic stupidity.
For almost a year and a half, most of us have stayed home as much as we could, helped our neighbors, homeschooled our children, faithfully worn masks and gotten our shots when it was our turn. Health care workers, in particular, have seen the most unfathomable human suffering, been forced to isolate from their families and have desperately pleaded with people to follow simple health rules and get vaccinated so that we can put COVID-19 behind us.
We were promised that by sacrificing, working hard and playing by the rules, we could put an end to mass death and finally get back to some of the things that bring us joy: having parties, going to festivals, traveling beyond our backyards and more.
But the dream of post-COVID normalcy is fading fast as Delta and other variants have ripped through our country, even infecting some of the vaccinated.
That’s also threatening our economic recovery, which is why you’re seeing corporate America step up with major companies like Walmart and Google finally issuing vaccine mandates.
Let’s be clear. Vaccine passports should have been mandatory from the jump. Counting on people to do the right thing has worked for most people during the pandemic — but there are millions who have proven they could care less about keeping others — or even themselves — alive.
But it seems to be in our DNA as Americans to cower in the face of an angry (white) minority, and so President Biden and many Democratic politicians were convinced that mandates wouldn’t work. Of course, even efforts by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other leaders to essentially bribe people into getting vaccinated with lottery-style raffles were deemed by Republicans as slightly less offensive than critical race theory.
Yes, there is a political divide in vaccination rates — and Republicans are on the wrong side of it. Let’s stop denying the obvious or making excuses for a party whose pandemic response has been a mix of crass pandering to their base and sociopathic stupidity.
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Knuckle-draggers do not deserve veto power over our safety. The only way we will make COVID an occasional nuisance instead of a mortal threat to everyone’s health is with vaccine mandates for everything from school to concerts to travel.
How did we get to a point where the proudly ignorant wield this much power, anyway?
Well, in my more than 20-year career in journalism, there has been one constant: You are never, ever to make people who are loudly anti-intellectual, knowingly spew lies and publicly pat themselves on the back for it, feel dumb. That is the sin of elitism and there is nothing worse, you see. Even casting the argument in positive terms, like lauding the value of higher education, is considered looking down on nice folks who insist that the Earth is flat and their theories should command the same respect as those of Galileo.
We’re told there’s nothing worse than living in liberal bubbles (even though those in the media and on the left are obsessed with trying to understand red state America). But you know what? Living in a blue enclave is a pretty great way to survive a plague. Nobody yells at you for wearing a mask at the gas station. Schools actually care about our kids’ safety. Officials aren’t trying to score political points off of our misery.
And so when I have taken publications to task for knowingly printing lies about COVID-19, particularly from GOP leaders who know exactly what they’re doing, the reaction is always dreadfully boring. A seasoned journalist (read: white and male) takes it upon himself to lecture me that I know nothing of journalism (even though I’ve run two publications and they typically have run none), and people must be trusted to make up their own minds and sift between facts and B.S.
How’s that working out as we’re facing another fall and winter trapped in our homes as unvaccinated-propelled variants crash across the country?
After this much unneeded agony, I’m done coddling the craven and crazy. And I know I’m not alone.
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Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.
