Ernie Atencio

My ten-year-old son is building a sandcastle on a Colorado River beach at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Three weeks ago there was a lot less sand to work with, says the national park volunteer at the nearby campground. This beach and others received a fresh load of redistributed sediment from a flood through the canyon March 5-7. A banana peel and other recent debris hang in the willows about ten feet above the river.

This was not a flood caused by a big storm or sudden snowmelt or the wrath or God, but the simple pull of a lever at Glen Canyon Dam, Ariz. just upstream. Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne opened the spillways to increase the flow of the river to about 41,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs). Three days later he shut it off. This is what passes for a flood these days, but doesn’t come close the natural floods of old. Park Ranger James on duty at Phantom Ranch refuses to call it a flood, but a “release.”

This is the third managed flood through Grand Canyon since 1996, intended to mimic natural flows that rebuild scarce beaches, quench high-water vegetation and restore breeding habitat for endangered fish. The 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act and an Environmental Impact Statement 13 years in the making call for managing flows through the canyon to benefit the environment instead of solely based on hydropower generation needs (HCN 7/22/96).

How much water is 41,000 cfs? It’s about 306,700 gallons per second, or enough water to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes, according to Kempthorne.

Since the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) installed Glen Canyon Dam as the major plumbing fixture of the Colorado River in 1963, streamflow has been governed by the whims of electricity needs in Phoenix instead of natural climatic cycles. In the early years of the dam wild fluctuations wreaked havoc with the inner canyon environment and sometimes stranded rafters for days at a time. The 1992 federal law limited flows to generally between 8,000 and 20,000 cfs.

We’ve all seen pictures of rafters being tossed around in monstrous, frothing rapids at 10,000 or 15,000 cfs, but imagine flows before the dam that typically went as high as 95,000 each year. The legendary El Niño year of 1983 created such runoff from the Colorado River basin that BuRec had to literally pull out all the stops and just barely saved the dam, releasing about 96,000 cfs into the canyon. As a park ranger on the north rim many years ago I learned that the river got up to a phenomenal 300,000 in 1884 and that there was evidence of canyon-gouging floods up to 500,000 cfs.

So even with the new beach where my son is playing and the dangling banana peel, it’s hard to be impressed with a three-day, 41,000 cfs flood.

Others were also unimpressed. Richard Mayol of the Grand Canyon Trust said, “The power industry is driving the Bureau of Reclamation more than anything else, as opposed to what’s best for the canyon.”

Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Steve Martin said that the science is clear that more frequent controlled floods, every year or two, is the best approach. A once-in-a-while flood without more regular high flows “could lead to impairment of the resources. . . . It’s not apparent where the 80 million dollars in research, conducted over the last 10 years has been used in this decision making process.”

Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility dismissed the whole affair as a “high flow stunt . . . nothing but a green wash to mask another betrayal of the Grand Canyon by its political custodians.”

The great flood of 2008 had the desired effect of rebuilding beaches and habitat, along with some good PR for Secretary Kempthorne and his Bureau of Reclamation, but those benefits will be eroded within 12 to 18 months without additional floods, Martin said.

The park volunteer, who has spent 20 years at the bottom of the canyon, says that three weeks after the flood the new beach is already sloughing away and he wonders how long it will last. It may turn out to be no sturdier than my son’s sandcastle.