Columnist Susan Synder: Dam these difficult questions

Susan Synder

Tuesday, June 18, 2002 | 12:26 p.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

This morning I drew water from the tap and poured it into the coffee maker.

I changed the water in the cat's dish, and then filled the watering can.

I watered the banana tree and African violets I inherited from a close friend who moved away. I watered the basil, cilantro and teeny forget-me-nots. I watered the pink geraniums in the guest room and a plant I cannot name, though it is my favorite because it refuses to let me kill it.

I started a load of wash and hopped into the shower.

When this is your daily routine, it's rather sticky to plop down at a computer terminal two hours later and bang out 475 words saying the Bureau of Reclamation's 100th anniversary is cause for a wake rather than the celebration conducted Monday at Hoover Dam.

President Theodore Roosevelt's Reclamation Act of 1902 created the bureau to provide water to the West's farmers. In 100 years it has built more than 180 projects in 17 states. The 67-year-old Hoover Dam alone provides drinking water and electricity to 23 million people.

But bureau adversaries say these projects are killing the West. About 400 miles upriver from Las Vegas is Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. Researchers were given barely three months to excavate and study Glen Canyon's more than 3,000 Indian cultural sites before the bureau flooded it with Colorado River water in 1962.

Downriver from Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon rewards those who sweat it out to the bottom with an ecosystem possessing beauty that defies description. Beaver, otter and muskrat once lived there. But we didn't get to see them.

Environmentalists say they have disappeared along with native flora and fish species because dams such as Glen Canyon trap nutrient-bearing sediments and ruin seasonal changes in water flow.

The Grand Canyon is dying.

But without the dams, reclamation bureau officials say we wouldn't have water for the irrigation and electricity that has allowed most of us to settle in the West.

Told you this was sticky. Do we want coffee and forget-me-nots in the kitchen every day or unparalleled beauty at the bottom of the Grand Canyon once in a lifetime?

We want both. But at what price?

"Thousands of river miles, critical habitat for endangered species and the cultural heritage of a number of indigenous tribes have all been devastated by the dams BuRec has constructed in the western United States," Owen Lammers, executive director of Living Rivers, has said.

Lammers and a group of Living Rivers supporters left Moab, Utah, on Thursday with a dump truck of sediment and stopped at Lake Powell, Lee's Ferry in Arizona and the Grand Canyon's South Rim before arriving at Hoover Dam Monday. They staged a demonstration a few hours before the bureau's laser light show and gala.

Living Rivers members say the bureau needs to overhaul its manner of doing business, including properly collecting water-delivery costs from corporate farmers and closing projects such as Glen Canyon Dam before it is too late.

It's a sticky spot. The ever-elusive "win-win" for which government officials strive doesn't seem to exist. Someone has to lose.

But who?