Lori Pottinger<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

$\"Hoover$ <\/a> $\"Nile_dam\"$ <\/div>\n

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Hoover Dam’s low water exposes a “bathtub ring”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Once upon a time, massive dams were built on the US West\u2019s mighty Colorado River, bringing scarce Depression-era jobs, water for farms, and electricity for industry. In the fairy tale version of the Hoover Dam story, everyone lived happily ever after. That\u2019s the story that Ethiopia wants us to believe, as it tries to convince the world of the merit of its own \u201cHoover Dam\u201d\u2013 the giant Grand Renaissance Dam, now under construction on the Blue Nile.<\/p>\n

But in recent years, the Hoover story has been taking a turn for the worse. A changing climate is wreaking havoc with the largest dam in the United States. The huge dam\u2019s reservoir, which has been dropping for over a decade, is now less than half full. The Colorado River no longer reaches the sea because of the large storage at Hoover and Glen Canyon dams.<\/p>\n

Ethiopian engineers recently\u00a0compared the Grand Renaissance Dam to Hoover\u00a0<\/span>as a project that can lift a struggling nation out of poverty, and a project whose accomplishments will go down in history.\u00a0 Yet the darker lessons from Hoover\u2019s long history might be equally relevant for Ethiopia to review. Consider:<\/p>\n

Shrinking electrical output:<\/strong>\u00a0The Colorado River is in an extended drought, and is\u00a0likely to see more \u201cmegadroughts\u201d\u00a0<\/a>as the climate warms. Lower reservoir levels mean less electricity output from large dams. Already at record low levels, Hoover Dam \u00a0could drop another 13 feet this summer.<\/a>\u00a0Researchers at the University of California in San Diego\u00a0predict<\/span>\u00a0that Hoover Dam has a 50% chance of decreasing to a point too low for power generation by 2017, and an equally high chance of going dry by 2021.<\/p>\n

Downstream Devastation:<\/strong>\u00a0The Colorado River Basin has been transformed by its large dams, in both intentional and unintentional ways. Jacques Leslie, author of the remarkable book\u00a0Deep Water<\/em>,\u00a0summarizes<\/a>\u00a0some of these impacts: \u201cTake away the Colorado River dams, and you return the silt gathering behind them to a free-flowing river, allowing it again to enrich the downstream wetlands and the once fantastically abundant, now often caked, arid, and refuse-fouled Delta. Take away the dams, and the Cocopa Indians, whose ancestors fished and farmed the Delta for more than a millennium, might have a chance of avoiding cultural extinction. Take away the dams, and the Colorado would again bring its nutrients to the Gulf of California, helping that depleted fishery to recover the status it held a half-century ago as an unparalleled repository of marine life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competition for Water:<\/strong>\u00a0Just as damming the Colorado has created winners and losers, it has also increasingly\u00a0created tension<\/span>\u00a0over who gets to use its waters. The river is shared by seven states and two countries; other stakeholders include Indian tribes, farming interests, environmental groups and cities. Peter McBride, who has just published a book on the Colorado River conflict,\u00a0says,\u00a0<\/a>\u201cThe big question is how we’re going to address it and on whose shoulders that these are going to lie. Basically, it’s going to be those who have money, those that can pay are going to get water.\u201d<\/p>\n

There some signs of cooperation in this saga: Mexico, home to the Colorado River\u2019s delta (now mostly a dead zone), will once again see some water flow into its borders. A\u00a0 historic agreement<\/a>signed in November 2012 commits both the United States and Mexico to deliver flow back to the Colorado Delta. The agreement calls for a five-year pilot program to increase water flows to restore the lower river and its delta, and increased water to Mexico during droughts. Although the\u00a0 amounts of water called for\u00a0<\/a>are less than American and Mexican environmental groups had argued for, they say it\u2019s a good first step, and hope the agreement will become permanent.<\/p>\n

Ethiopia is clearly hoping that its huge dam will make history. Yet it\u2019s possible that the Grand Renaissance Dam will face similar problems as its American cousin, and go down in history for all the wrong reasons. If the dam does founder on the shoals of drought and\u00a0 water conflict<\/a>, it will be harder for a poor nation like Ethiopia to recover. A thorough environmental impact assessment (EIA) might have turned up some answer, but we\u2019re told the project\u2019s EIA is woefully inadequate (it has not been published). The dam\u2019s downstream impacts were so poorly addressed in the original EIA that conflict over the dam began even before an ounce of concrete was poured. Ethiopia finally agreed to allow experts from Sudan and Egypt to join a panel of experts mandated to look at the dam\u2019s impacts on the downstream neighbors, but the process has been flawed and Egypt is\u00a0 calling for more complete studies\u00a0<\/a>on the downstream impacts (something that should have been done before construction was begun).<\/p>\n