For 24 hours starting early every Sunday morning, small pipes suck samples from the river of sewage flowing into the South Platte Water Renewal Partners wastewater treatment plant in Englewood for 24 hours.
The tubes deposit the raw sewage into containers inside a box that resembles a mini fridge. Goggled, masked and gloved workers then haul the samples to the plant lab, package it in special vials and overnight it to a lab near Boston.
Colorado and other Western states will be hard-pressed to shield their rivers and streams under a new federal Clean Water Act rule finalized last month, largely because hundreds of shallow Western rivers are no longer protected, and writing new state laws and finding the cash to fill the regulatory gap will likely take years, officials said.
Though many agricultural interests and water utilities support the new Waters of the U.S. rule, as it is known, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Patrick Pfaltzgraff, director of the state’s Water Quality Control Division, said they will take legal action to protect streams that are no longer subject to federal oversight.
CHEYENNE – For nearly a century, the Colorado River Compact has practically been seen as scripture for states from Wyoming all the way down to the Mexican border.
The compact – written in the years populations in the American Southwest first began to explode – has been the code by which life along the Colorado River Basin has been granted, a strict allocation of the snowmelt from the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the Arizona desert and the parched reaches of the expansive fields of Southern California.
San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico — Under the red girders of a nondescript toll bridge, waves gently lapped coarse sands in a gritty corner of this northwestern Mexican border city.
“There is usually no water and vegetation, and the ground looks like this,” local conservationist Alejandra Calvo-Fonesca said, gesturing toward the dusty shoreline of the Colorado River.
For a few months this winter, residents welcomed an unexpected surge of water in the river – a phenomenon they had not experienced since the spring 2014 “pulse flow,” when the United States released 107,000 acre-feet of water into the Colorado River Delta over a two-month period. That seminal event brought revelers in droves, eager to celebrate the revival of a historic waterway that is not only the city’s namesake, but a source of pride for its people.
In the early 1980s, the small city of Woodland Park started strategically planning how to protect its water supply for the future.
“Because we have all junior water rights and a limited water supply, we knew we must be very careful about how we grow,” said Sally Riley, planning director for Woodland Park, which is home to approximately 7,500 people in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. “We’ve pretty much mapped out exactly how our 6.5 square miles are going to grow.”
To ensure that they don’t develop beyond the limits of their water supply, Riley says the city has closely integrated its land-use decisions with local water conservation and efficiency goals that align with the Colorado Water Plan.
When Wendy Rash was diagnosed in 2005 with a thyroid disorder, chronic fatigue and other ailments, her doctor couldn’t explain her suddenly failing health.
Soon, other family members became ill. Her brother-in-law contracted fatal kidney cancer. Her father-in-law developed esophageal cancer. Then her 32-year-old son began having severe kidney problems.
A climate-driven shift toward extreme storms has compelled Colorado officials to rethink the safety of hundreds of dams across the state that hold water and mine waste, including 27 high-hazard structures near people that already are listed as deficient.
They’re trying to calculate the potential for sudden hard rain resulting in flooding and accelerated erosion that could trigger fatal collapses.
We haven’t published many ten-part editorials in the Daily Post over the past 15 years. But we also don’t come across many political issues — local, state, or national — as complicated or as perplexing as the declining lake levels in the two largest reservoirs situated on the Colorado River: Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
