GrokSurf's San Diego

Local observations on water, environment, technology, law & politics

Preserving Colorado River resources in the Grand Canyon

Posted by George J Janczyn on February 9, 2010

It turns out that a high-flow experiment conducted by USGS to flush extra water from Glen Canyon Dam down the Colorado River in order to restore riverbanks and sandbars turned out to be a wash. Sandbar development occurred but once normal flows of clean water returned, so did the erosion.

Here’s what I think. Bring in one of those ocean sand-dredging machines to Glen Canyon Dam. Instead of pumping sediment out and dumping it somewhere, simply stir it up and let it flow out with the water being released. Voila! A year-round supply of sediment to maintain riverbanks and sandbars.

 

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s