When Enough is Enough

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. 

        Steve’s prodigal brother Tom is a Woodland gentleman-rancher and columnist who founded, writes and stars in The Park City Follies.  He is a wicked Telemark skier and water aficionado, like most skiers and ranchers.  He is also a lawyer by profession, and not a bad one at that, who was the Park City Attorney for several of our formative years.  They are solid, smart people, who are serious, righteous dudes, with a sense of humor.  They are usually the smartest guys in the room, as long as Chris Robinson or John Haney are absent. 

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.

Sure, we could cut down all the frivolous forests and pave the Cottonwood Canyons to increase our water supply but what kind of dystopian world would that be.  We need to fit into the world and the climate more than forcing it to fit us.  Dominion over all means restraint and responsibility not repression or domination.  Beneficial Use of our water resources is for the common good of the majority.  Salt Lake dust storms and the dry Colorado River is not beneficial use for the public welfare and we must emphasize that concept, not ignore it.  Since supply is decreasing we need to use less. 

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.

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[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

 

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