Addressing one of the big problems facing all of the urban and rural parts of northern Colorado, Jeff Stahla, Public Information Officer at Northern Water, gave us a brief history and current status of water management in northern Colorado at our noon meeting on September 18.
Historically, Stephen Long, in mapping this part of the American west, named it “the Great American Desert” “wholly unfit for cultivation”, in spite of the presence of vast herds of buffalo and widespread evidence of indigenous human habitation. One benefit of this exaggeration was that it discouraged any influx of Spain from the south, Britain from the north, and Russia from the west. Once American settlers from the east became established in the area, they realized that water management, including trans-basin moving of water from where it was abundant to where it was scarce, would be necessary, especially in the inevitable dry years. This led to the construction of Grand Ditch starting in 1890, Chambers Lake between 1886 and 1910, and the Larimer River Tunnel in 1911. The Larimer River Tunnel, reducing the amount of water available to Wyoming, downstream from that tunnel, resulted in Wyoming suing Colorado and establishing the precedent that an upstream state may not use water in such a way as to harm a downstream state. This also established the fact that the US constitution allows states to make compacts covering such things as water rights as long as those compacts are approved by the US Congress. This was one of the first steps toward the Colorado River Compact, ultimately governing water rights and access on the Colorado River and allowing the movement of Colorado River water across the Continental Divide to the Front Range area (the Colorado-Big Thompson Project), this providing some 50% of the water that is available today in the Front Range.
The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District was formed in 1937 to manage and maintain the water and associated facilities for bringing that water to the Eastern Slope. Northern Water collects a small property tax from all residents in its area of operation to repay the US Government for the Colorado-Big Thompson project, which includes Horsetooth Reservoir but also along the Platte River all the way to the Nebraska border. This project was built in the 1950s with the first water arriving in 1957. This availability of water encouraged a series of high-tech firms, starting with Hewlett-Packard, to move to the Front Range area, slowly evolving the economy from strictly agricultural to mixed industrial/agricultural. These additional uses led to the need to develop other sources of water, including the Windy Gap Project (below the confluence of the Colorado and Fraser Rivers just west of Granby), and the formation of the Municipal Sub-District of Northern Water, which is paid for by rate-payers rather than by additional taxes. Windy Gap was reasonably successful, but had some limits because, in dry years, the junior water rights could not be supplied, and in wet years, the federal government would not allow the water to be removed from the full Lake Granby. So other sources were needed. For Fort Collins, one of the work-arounds was to do a deal with Platte River Power to use their water for municipal uses before sending the effluent on to the power plant for their cooling purposes.
For wider purposes, the Chimney Hollow Reservoir is being constructed SW of Loveland. Permitting for this project was started in 2003 but, with both bureaucratic stuff and then a lawsuit, ground was not broken until 2021. This is on land that was purchased from Hewlett-Packard with Larimer County Open Lands combining with Northern Water to provide the funds, Larimer County getting the land above the expected full lake level and Northern Water getting the area to be under water. In the absence of sufficient clay in the soil/rock under the dam, the main dam will be an asphalt-core dam (a technology widely used in Europe) with the rock/soil of the main volume of the dam supporting the pressure of the water in the reservoir, but the asphalt core keeping the water from filtering through the dam. The total cost for the reservoir, including not only the dam itself but also a separate saddle dam (adding some 20,000 acre feet to the volume of the reservoir), all of the other infrastructure and some remediation around Windy Hollow on the western slope will be on the order of $750 million. All of the material for the dam (except the asphalt for the core) will be quarried on site, so the only importation to the site over local roads will be the asphalt for the core, diesel to run the equipment, cement, and the on-site workers.
There was no time for questions but I’m sure that Mr. Stahla would be happy to answer questions at jstahla@northernwater.org