What would happen if the Glen Canyon Dam broke?

Glen Canyon Dam is the central element of the Colorado River Storage Project. If it failed, the resulting damage could limit or completely cut off water supply to residences or farmlands along the Colorado River, and depending on damage to canal headworks, even cut off water to southern California.

Which dam was almost lost in 1983?

Yet it was during the summer of 1983 that the Bureau of Reclamation almost lost control of the Colorado River to a rampaging flood. Normal runoff from the snowpack along the Continental Divide was forecast that year, so Lake Powell, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, was drawn down only slightly.

What is a major problem with building large dams such the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River?

The construction of Glen Canyon Dam has brought major changes to the ecosystem of the Colorado River downstream of the dam. One of them happens due to the trapping behind the Dam all the sediment and nutrients that come from the 279,300 km2 watershed area above the Dam (Ingebretsen 1998; Grams et al. 2015).

What were some negative consequences of the Glen Canyon Dam?

The introduction of the Glen Canyon Dam significantly affected the natural seasonal temperature variation of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. This change in temperature regime adversely affected endangered humpback chub fish habitat.

What was the cause of Glen Canyon Dam to fail?

The dam, anchored in unstable Navajo sandstone (sometimes said to be “solidified sand dunes”), nearly failed in 1983 as the result of a flood on the upper Colorado River that led to extended use of its tunnel spillways. The spillways, designed for short-term use, soon underwent cavitation and began to fail.

Who was the chief of Reclamation at Glen Canyon?

The only thing in its way was Glen Canyon Dam, which had only been completed 20 years before and had only been filled close to capacity once. Tom Gamble remembers standing on a platform watching the water burst from the spillway into the river. He was the chief of dam operations for the Bureau of Reclamation at Glen Canyon.

How big is Lake Powell from Glen Canyon Dam?

“We were sitting on a pretty good catastrophe waiting to happen,” said Art Grosch, an electrician who worked at the dam and ran electrical cable into the mangled spillways. “That lake (Powell) is 190 miles long and has something like 2,300 miles of shoreline,” he said. “And it was rising a foot a day.”

When was Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam built?

Glen Canyon Dam. A dam in Glen Canyon was studied as early as 1924, but these plans were initially dropped in favor of the Hoover Dam (completed in 1936) which was located in the Black Canyon. By the 1950s, due to rapid population growth in the seven U.S. and two Mexican states comprising the Colorado River Basin,…