Atmospheric rivers endanger the West by

Dave Marston

Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet rainwater ooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer. Extremes are common in a desert: Rain and snow are rare, and a deluge can cause ooding.

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Weisheit, 68, co-director of Living Rivers and a former Colorado River guide, has long warned the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that its two biggest dams on the Colorado River could become useless because of prolonged drought.

Although recently, at a BuRec conference, he also warned that “atmospheric rivers” could overtop both dams, demolishing them and causing widespread ooding.

Weisheit points to BuRec research by Robert Swain in 2004, showing an 1884 spring runo that delivered two years’ worth of Colorado River ows in just four months. California well knows the damage that long, narrow corridors of water vapor — atmospheric rivers — can do. Starting in December, one atmospheric storm followed another over the state, dumping water and snow on already saturated ground. e multiple storms moved fast, sometimes over 60 miles per hour, and they quickly dropped their load. Atmospheric rivers can carry water vapor equal to 27 Mississippi Rivers. ese storms happen every year, but what makes them feel new is their ferocity, which some scientists blame on climate change warming the oceans and heating the air to make more powerful storms. e real risk is when storms stack up as they did in California. at happened in spades during the winter of 1861-’62, in the middle of a decade-long drought, when the West endured 44 days of rain and wet snow. California Governor-elect Leland Stanford rowed to a soggy oath-of-o ce ceremony in ooded Sacramento, just before eeing with state leaders to San Francisco.

In California, overwhelmed storm drains sent polluted water to the sea. Roads became waterways, sinkholes opened up to capture cars and their drivers, and houses ooded. At least 22 people died.

Where do these fast-moving storms come from? Mostly north and south of Hawaii, then they barrel directly toward California and into the central West, says F. Martin Ralph, who directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

“Forty percent of the snowpack in the upper Colorado in the winter is from atmospheric river storms penetrating that far inland,” he adds.

Water covered California’s inland valley for three months, and paddle wheel steamers navigated over submerged farmlands and inland towns. e state went bankrupt, and its economy collapsed as mining and farming operations were bogged down, one-quarter of livestock drowned or starved, and 4,000 people died.

In Utah that winter, John Doyle Lee chronicled the washing away of the town of Santa Clara along the tiny Santa Clara River near St. George. Buildings and farms oated away leaving only a single wall of a rock fort that townspeople had built on high ground.

Weisheit knows this history well because he’s been part of a team of “paleo ood” investigators, a group of scientists and river experts. To document just how high ood waters rose in the past, researchers climb valley walls. e Journal of Hydrology says they seek “ ne grained sediments, mainly sand.” e Green River contributes roughly half the water that’s in the Lower Colorado River, and in 2005, Weisheit and other investigators found six ood sites along the Green River near Moab, Utah. Weisheit says several sites showed the river running at 275,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). If the Green River merged with the Colorado River, also at ood, the Colorado River would carry almost ve times more water than the 120,000 cfs that barreled into Glen Canyon Dam, some 160 miles below Moab, in 1984. at epic runo nearly wiped out Glen Canyon Dam.

It’s a peculiar science, searching for sand bars and driftwood perched 60 feet above the river.

Now that we’ve remembered the damage that atmospheric river storms can do, Weisheit believes the Bureau of Reclamation must tear down Glen Canyon — now.

He likes to quote Western historian Patty Limerick, who told the Bureau of Reclamation, at a University of Utah conference in 2007, what she really thought: “ e Bureau can only handle little droughts and little oods. When the big ones arrive, the system will fail.” is opinion column does not necessarily re ect the views of Boulder Weekly.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonpro t dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

Hand-crafted by Paul Voakes

Afew years ago, just before my retirement, I knew I had achieved true “elder” status on the faculty when I announced, just as I had the previous 46 semesters, that the rst exam of the semester would be conducted in blue books.

“What’s a blue book?” a student asked, for the rst time in my professional career.

“You mean like, get a price on a car?” another young man asked. “For the test? I don’t get it.” e blue book (academic, not automotive) meant that students would have to create essay-form answers by hand, with pens, inside a small (usually 24-page) booklet. e Post author, Markham Heid, proposed a radical countero ensive: Bring back handwriting.

Just last week I noticed an op-ed piece in the Washington Post about ChatGPT, an arti cial-intelligence program (introduced in November) that can produce remarkably credible pieces of writing. It has caused a good deal of hand-wringing in academic circles, because of its potential to enable plagiarism.

Since the introduction of word processing programs, handwriting has become an ever-smaller part of daily life for nearly every adult in the United States. We put pen to paper to send the occasional greeting card, perhaps to write a personal check, maybe a shopping list. (But even most shoppers at the supermarket, I’ve noticed, now consult their phones.) e bene ts of writing with computers are plain. It helps the environment by saving millions of reams of paper each day. And using a word processor is simply more e cient. A keyboarding writer can compose an essay, even making 159 revisions, in a small fraction of the time it would take to write the same essay by hand. And as some of us recall from our school days, misspelling a single word often meant tearing up the sheet and starting again. were the ndings that handwriting is positively correlated with better processing of concepts, more creation of original work, and better accuracy in comprehending foreign languages.

Is there value in reading and writing cursive? e education establishment seems to have little appetite for handwriting instruction. Twelve years ago, handwriting was dropped from the nation’s Common Core for grades K-12. Since then, I’m pleased to see, nearly half of the states — but not Colorado — have reinstated the mandate.