The National Park Service is spending $74 million to move a single dock at Lake Powell – because the reservoir has dropped so far that the dock no longer reaches the water.
NPR reported the expenditure Saturday, June 21, as part of ongoing coverage of how relentlessly shrinking water levels at the Colorado River reservoir have forced repeated, costly infrastructure moves at one of the country’s most-visited recreational lakes.
Background
Lake Powell straddles the Utah-Arizona border and sits behind Glen Canyon Dam. It has been hammered by drought for years. The reservoir’s surface has fallen so dramatically that docks built when water levels were higher now dead-end above dry canyon walls or exposed sediment – useless to boaters trying to launch or dock.
That’s not a one-time problem. The park service hasn’t moved docks once and called it done. As the water keeps dropping, infrastructure has to follow — and every move costs money. Seventy-four million dollars, in this case, for a single structure.
The broader drought gripping the Colorado River basin has put sustained pressure on both Lake Powell and Lake Mead downstream. Water managers and federal agencies have spent years negotiating cuts to water deliveries across seven states that depend on the river, trying to keep both reservoirs from falling to levels that would threaten hydroelectric generation and municipal water supplies.
Lake Powell’s storage capacity is measured against a figure called “full pool” – roughly 26.2 million acre-feet. The reservoir hasn’t been close to that mark in years. Low inflows, rising temperatures, and increased evaporation have all chipped away at it, and the park service has been left scrambling to keep visitor infrastructure functional as the shoreline retreats.
The $74 million figure doesn’t cover the full scope of what’s been spent moving and repositioning docks across the reservoir over the years; that total wasn’t specified in the NPR report. Whether Congress has specifically appropriated the funds for this latest move, or whether the money is coming from existing NPS accounts, also wasn’t made clear.
The National Park Service has not announced a timeline for completing the dock relocation.
Originally reported by NPR. Read the original report.
