When we last left our apocalyptic water tale of doom and gloom, we concluded that there was enough water out there and it just depended on us to use it wisely. Well, I found out that is not exactly true. I had the opportunity to speak recently with the first legates of Utah water, the Clyde family, who said ‘maybe not’. Steve is the preeminent water lawyer in the state, walking in the formidable footsteps of his father Steve Sr. and mentoring his own hipster son Jonathan as the next generation of lawful water excellence. They have their own Law Firm called Clyde – Snow, founded in 1949 that plays well with The Church, The State, The Feds, and the private sector.
The dirty little secret of water
lawyers is that they all quietly wanted to be engineers or hydrologist. Tragically,
they could not get thru the brain numbing, calculus calisthenics that enable
engineering thinking and they did not look good in flannel shirts. They do have a surprisingly good sense of the
engineering concepts and numbers, and can even convert from CFS to ac-ft/day in
their heads (multiply by 2)[i].
The Clydes reminded me recently that
even though The State of Utah gets/got 60 million ac-ft of precipitation in a
year (2 trillion gallons) we receive only 3-5 million ac-ft we can use after evapotranspiration
and infiltration. The Great Salt Lake
needs 8 million ac-ft (250 billion gallons or enough to fill Flaming Gorge). That would mean that in order to save the
Great Salt Lake, we would have to use no water at all, for anything, agriculture,
golf courses, lawns and all, in the state of Utah, for two years. There simply is not enough water. The same bleak numbers apply to the Colorado River,
which now gets 10% of the water it was originally dedicated to deliver. Eureka!
This latest 20-year exponentially
compounding drought and our current 6-month, record smashing heat wave are more
of a symptom of the real sickness that is climate change. It is because Utah uses more water per capita
than any state and we put too much carbon in the air. So, the real answer is to grow less grass for
cows and golf courses, stop burning stuff and voting for people who say silly things
like ‘drill baby drill’.
There may be nuclear powered desalinization
plants, to augment The River, or saltwater pumps from the ocean, to augment The
Lake, in our future. That is when the
price of water gets high enough to justify the fair economics of spending trillions
on these solutions. For now, it is a question
of political will and communal discipline to create a pivotal culture change
for the long-term public welfare.
The Clydes remind me that we are in
this together, all for one and one for all.
We need leaders like we had when; we started numbering World Wars and Depressions,
9-11, January 6 and Covid -19. Leaders
with the charisma, backbone and foresight to meet the seminal challenge of our
generation; climate change, which is coming to fulfillment before our very
eyes. It is about time we start listening
attentively to the scientists, engineers, meteorologists, hydrologists, economists,
and all the experts, even if they are lawyers.
We need people who can communicate and lead the masses using a slide
rule and the rule of law, the Socratic and Scientific methods,. Like the Clyde family.
[i] CFS
or cubic feet per second is a flow rate of 450 GPM and the size of a basketball
weighing 64 pounds. An acre foot is
326,000 gallons, a volume enough for 2-4 families per year that can cover a
football field in one foot of water and weighs 2.5 million pounds. The Colorado River usually flows 20-100,000
CFS, enough for 40 million people and the Great Salt Lake usually holds 8-million-acre
feet of water – enough to suppress toxic dust and even induce seismicity of the
Wasatch Fault. Water is heavy, powerful
and valuable.
Matthew Lindon, P.E.
Snyderville Utah
Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com
