While the brainstorm of the Sierra Club received a congressional hearing yesterday, lawmakers were anything but supportive. And the Clinton administration said it has no plans even to consider paying for an environmental impact review. The cost of draining the lake, one of the most popular recreation sites in the federal park system, could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, although administration officials declined even to speculate. Last November, the board of directors of the 600,000-member Sierra Club caught even other environmental groups off guard when it unanimously called for draining Lake Powell, the country's second largest manmade lake created 20 years ago by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. It took years to fill the lake and no one would speculate how long it might take to drain it.
Sometime ideas are hard to look at . . .
The dam upriver from the Grand Canyon was built in the 1950s to help harness the unpredictable Colorado River and to generate electricity. But the massive lake created behind the 710-foot dam also has become a recreational success, attracting 2.5 million visitors annually, including nearly 2 million that camp overnight, second only to Yosemite National Park. Brower, head of the Earth Island Institute in San Francisco, was the Sierra Club's executive director when the Glen Canyon dam was built in the 1950s and has said he regrets not opposing it more vigorously then. In a letter to the House Resources subcommittee on water and power and the subcommittee on parks and public lands, Brower said the lake loses enough water in evaporation to restore Mexico's Sea of Cortez, which biologists say is threatened by U.S. overuse of the water of the Colorado River. Sediment is accumulating on the floor of the lake and two-stroke boat motors leave the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez oil spill in it every four years, he said.