Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake
In Arizona, much of its water is drawn from the Colorado River. As everyone knows, The Lake Colorado Eiver Reservoirs dropped ~150 feet since 1983. It gained water due to the recent hurricane and also a large snowfall this last year. It still has not returned to prior levels. Meanwhile, the state of Arizona continues to build more houses to accommodate people. Somewhere there is a balance here and only the Federal Government can set it. Just another example of how states and cities ignore the obvious and work towards their own interests.
Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake: ‘Trying to avert disaster,’ The Guardian, Maanvi Singh
Environmental and community groups are suing Utah officials over failures to save its iconic Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse.
The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A mega-drought across the US southwest, accelerated by global heating, is hastening Salt Lake’s demise.
Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances. The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year.
Despite such warnings, officials have failed to take serious action, local groups said in their lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday. Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies added.
“We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action.
Plaintiffs pray that this Court declare that the State of Utah has breached its trust duty to ensure water flows into the Great Salt Lake sufficient to maintain the Lake,” reads the lawsuit, which was brought by coalition that includes Earthjustice, the Utah Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, among others.
Despite growing political momentum on the issue, scientists say the proposed measures are not nearly enough to save the lake, which has lost about 40bn gallons of water annually since 2020.
The state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has suspended new claims to water in the Great Salt Lake basin and appointed a commissioner to oversee response to the lake crisis. Last year, Utah’s legislature passed several conservation measures, including a $40m trust to support lake preservation projects. But Abbott and his colleagues, who authored a sobering report on the lake in January, found that those measures increased flows to the lake by just 100,000-acre feet in 2022. About 2.5m acre-feet a year of water will need to flow into the lake to bring it to a healthy level, the researchers estimated.
That water will likely have to come at the expense of agriculture, which takes in about three-quarters of the water diverted away from the lake to grow mostly alfalfa and hay. Cities and mineral extraction operations each take up another 9% of diverted water.
But wresting water away from agriculture is politically complicated. Officials have explored propositions to pay farmers to fallow land and use less water, though such proposals have yet to gain much tractions.
Lawmakers have also offered up a series of out-of-the-box solutions – including cloud seeding, which uses chemicals to prompt more precipitation – or building a giant pipeline from the Pacific Ocean.
Emma Williams, a spokesperson for Cox, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Although historic winter snowfall has caused the lake to rise in recent months, perversely increasing the risk for violent runoff, scientists have warned that one wet year is not enough to reverse years of drought and water overuse. Stu Gillespie, an attorney for Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain office . . .
“The Great Salt Lake belongs to the people of Utah and the state has a legal obligation to protect this resource. But the state has sidestepped that obligation and failed to respond to the crisis facing the lake.”
Already, the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area, and is becoming saltier, threatening native flies and brine shrimp. A diminished lake may be unable to support the more than 10 million migratory birds that stop over in the region. A white pelican colony recently abandoned a nesting site on the lake, potentially due to declining water levels. Utah campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity Deeda Seed . . .
“In addition to the millions of people who live here, so many plants and animals depend on the lake. The health of northern Utah’s entire population depends on the Great Salt Lake’s survival and I hope this lawsuit can help save it.”
Cities need to secure their drinking water, Angry Bear, David Zetland, The one-handed economist.
Conservation Groups Sue Utah for Starving the Great Salt Lake of Water, treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer.
EARTH The Great Salt Lake is shrinking. What can we do to stop it?
Science News – April 17
A recent report suggests the lake could disappear within five years
Hmmm. It would seem that water drawn from the Great Salt Lake is far too salty to be used for drinking or irrigation purposes. So, what is up with this, otherwise?
@Fred,
If you read the post, you’ll see this: “The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns.”
It’s not the loss of irrigation water, drinking water and lawn irrigation water *taken from* the lake itself, it’s the water that is diverted from *upstream sources* for those purposes *before* it gets to the lake. That’s what’s up.
So, it’s not exactly a problem that the Lake is drying up. The problem is that people are consuming too much water out there & they should stop doing that.
@Fred,
Actually, it’s both and they are connected. Again, if you read the post at the top: “Already, the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area, and is becoming saltier, threatening native flies and brine shrimp. A diminished lake may be unable to support the more than 10 million migratory birds that stop over in the region. A white pelican colony recently abandoned a nesting site on the lake, potentially due to declining water levels. . . .
“In addition to the millions of people who live here, so many plants and animals depend on the lake. The health of northern Utah’s entire population depends on the Great Salt Lake’s survival and I hope this lawsuit can help save it.”
@Fred,
If you read the sciencenews link you posted, you would find this: “Sediments at the bottom of saline lakes also collect a slew of pollutants from human activities, such as chemicals from urban and agricultural runoff and toxic mine waste. Historical mining and smelting around the Great Salt Lake, for example, deposited heavy metals like mercury and lead that have accumulated in the lake bed’s sediments. Once exposed, these metals can be transported by dust particles and may increase rates of disease associated with air pollution, according to the January report from the BYU team.”
So, the end is near. Go figure. I don’t mean to be blasé about it.
Well, I think we know (& knew) this is/was inevitable.
Maybe not just for the Great Salt Lake.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
If ‘people stop consuming too much water’, the GSL will last longer.
Do you imagine that the folks in the Great Red State that is Utah are going to instruct their guv’mint to regulate the amount of water that is being diverted from flowing into the GSL? I don’t think so.
The operating principles of the western states, perhaps except for Oregon & Washingon state, have always been ‘less guv’mint regulation of natural resource consumption’, I’m pretty sure. Where ‘less’ means ‘none’.
By the way, I was looking for was just how much ‘irrigation water, drinking water and lawn irrigation water is *taken from* the lake itself’, and the answer seems to be NONE, as it is far too salty.
@Fred,
“By the way, I was looking for was just how much ‘irrigation water, drinking water and lawn irrigation water is *taken from* the lake itself’, and the answer seems to be NONE, as it is far too salty.”
Yes. I covered exactly that point in my 9:24 AM post: “It’s not the loss of irrigation water, drinking water and lawn irrigation water *taken from* the lake itself, it’s the water that is diverted from *upstream sources* for those purposes *before* it gets to the lake. That’s what’s up.”
Your response implied that ‘some’ water is taken from the GSL, which didn’t make sense to me since I know that such water is saltier than that from the ocean. Hence my confusion.
@Fred,
I can’t see anywhere that I said “some” water was taken from the Great Salt Lake for irrigation, drinking or lawn watering. I can see you were confused, but it seems you were reading something that wasn’t there.
Owens lake. Mono lake. It took decades of lawsuits and settlements and more lawsuits and settlements just to get to a point where you could say things were better than they had been at their worst.
Anyone who cares about the Great Salt Lake has a lot of history to learn from. I really hope they can learn from the mistakes and efforts that were done here. Before it is too late to fix.
Hello? knock knock knock Is there any air left in here?
This could be seen as the inevitable end result of a thousands year process that began with the end of the ice age; the breakup of the Bonneville Ice Dam and the carving out of the Snake River. It’s fun to look at the maps of what happened then and ‘what if?’ What if the ice dam had broke loose about a hundred and fifty miles south and flowed south rather than to the west and northwest. It was drying up before the Mormons started diverting it for drinking and irrigation. That the increase in human population hence may have amplified that ~ views differ
This isn’t new. I don’t remember which ~ probably Cadillac Desert ~ but I first read of this in the nineties …
Clarifying: It was going dry before the Mormons started diverting its sources for drinking and irrigation …
It could be that to the hard core of the Utah GOP that any ‘fresh’ water that makes it into the Great Salt Lake is lost forever, ecomically-speaking.
Groups sue Utah, trying to save Great Salt Lake with the public trust doctrine
Salt Lake Tribune – Sep 6
Utah Republicans block resolution to create target level for the Great Salt Lake
Salt Lake Tribune – Feb 2
Looking like a great wedge issue for Utah Dems! (As if.)