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Now that Two Forks has been zapped by the EPA, the Metropolitan Water Providers will have to consider alternatives -- making better use of existing water supplies, or else building more storage.
However, water efficiency is not an acceptable course in Colorado. The exotic emerald grasses of suburbia must glow like verdant Ireland, or else no one would move here and occasion the need for even more water. If a farmer finds a way to grow crops with less water, he could lose part of his precious water right. The national average per-capita water usage is 1,400 gallons a day; in Colorado, it's 4,190 gallons.
Since conservation would cause the water providers to lose both income and political clout, they'll turn to other storage and augmentation projects. Here's the plan:
· Eliminate phreatophytes. Never heard of a phreatophyte? It's a useless tree which sucks up precious water that could otherwise be diverted to beneficial use and sold at a profit. The U.S. Forest Service has audaciously claimed that even scrub oaks have water rights. Such arrogance cannot go unpunished.
Colorado has 34,798 square miles of forest in the mountains, whose average annual precipitation is 23 inches. Some studies indicate that trees waste at least a third of that. Work at the Fraser Experimental Forest has demonstrated that clear-cutting caues a substantal increase in run-off.
With a few major forest fires, extensive herbicide spraying and more subsidies to the timber industry, thousands of jobs would be provided. The result is a yearly supply increase of 210 billion gallons of water that was previously squandered on montane flora. The views in the mountains will improve when there aren't all those trees in the way, so tourism will be enhanced, too.
· Start a civil war. Under various interstate compacts, Colorado must send certain quantities of water downstream to Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Arizona, even California -- a state which takes plenty of Colorado River water, even though California contributes not one drop to its flow.
By making its prior obligations inoperative, Colorado could keep more water. If the other states complained, well, what do we have a National Guard for? Should the tide of conventional warfare turn against us, we also have a nuclear warhead factory. And if those downstream leaches really want our precious fluids, give them the good stuff we've been reserving for our own citizens: heavy-metal water from the Arkansas, carcinogenic water from Adams County wells, tritium water from Rocky Flats.
· Middle Park Reservoir. All that water doesn't mean much unless there's a way to save it for a non-rainy day. Fortunately, most of the facilities are already in place for something that would dwarf Two Forks.
A lot of Front Range water comes through the tiny pilot bore of the Moffat Tunnel, while the D&RGW runs trains through the big main bore. Eliminate the tracks, and the diversion capacity increases at least tenfold.
Fifty miles west of the tunnel, the Colorado River slices through the Gore Range. The entrance to Gore Canyon is a perfect site for a 1400-foot-high dam (it could go higher, but then water would spill over Muddy Pass and down the North Platte, where windy Wyoming or those annoying Nebraska cranes might get some, and that would never do).
The reservoir would cover at least 600 square miles and store about 179 million acre-feet, which comes to 58 trillion gallons of water, an 11-year supply for every current Colorado resident.
We could quadruple our population to 13 million, with a consequent real estate boom, and still have ample water for expansive bluegrass lawns, irrigated sidewalks and the other things that make Colorado such a desirable place to live, at the trifling expense of ridding the mountains of trees, declaring war on our neighbors and flooding a cold, remote valley that already holds half a dozen little reservoirs to supply Front Range water.
All the Water Providers have to do is present this plan, and Two Forks will start to look pretty good.
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