Thirsty Colorado Is Proposing to Stick a ‘Big Straw’ Into Its Namesake River

It’s an audacious -- some say absurd -- scheme: Take Colorado River water just before it slips over the Utah border, pump it east more than 200 miles, lift it 5,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains and deliver it to the state’s burgeoning Front Range communities.

Nicknamed the “Big Straw,” it is a big, old-fashioned kind of idea, reminiscent of the mega-water projects that greened the West in the 20th century. Estimates of its cost start at $2.5 billion and climb. Opponents call it a giant boondoggle in the making that would suck water from some of Utah’s most popular rafting spots and deplete flows needed by endangered fish.

The Big Straw’s grand scope underscores Colorado’s keen desire to protect its full share of the 1,400-mile-long river that cleaves the Southwest like a rusty saw.

Downstream in California, the plan is seen as a harbinger of the future, when the rising demands of other states along the Colorado will inevitably staunch the bounteous surplus on which the Golden State has long depended.

The water hog of the Colorado, California has no choice but to stand by while other states move to tap their full entitlements meted out by Congress and a multi-state compact in the 1920s and ‘40s. “They have a right to develop their apportionment,” said Dennis Underwood, vice president of the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

California’s prodigious thirst looms large in Western water policy and is helping drive the Big Straw proposal. Politicians see it as a way to keep Colorado water in Colorado -- and out of the swimming pools and sprinkler systems of Southern California.

“While Coloradans are carefully considering which day they are allowed to turn their home sprinklers on, California lawns are lush and green, thanks to Colorado’s water,” Gov. Bill Owens lamented during a water policy discussion this spring

The Big Straw proposal is still in the earliest stages of review. A $500,000 study, due out in the fall, will determine only if the project is worth pursuing, not whether it will be built.

Nobody can say at this point how much electrical power it would take to transport the water, how much the project would cost, who would pay for it, what the route of the pipeline would be, or how much treatment the water would require. Nor can anyone say precisely who would use the water, which is coveted more for the Front Range’s future growth than current consumption.

But Grand Junction water attorney and Big Straw backer Gregory Hoskin believes there is a ready market, even if the water proves expensive.

“This is the desert. People can’t stand the desert. They need trees. They need green,” insisted Hoskin, a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “I don’t know what people will pay for water. But I know people with money will pay anything to water their lawn.”

Were it not for a mismatch of geography, Coloradans would probably already be using their full share of the river. But the Colorado, like most of the state’s water, is on the western side of the Rockies, while most of its people -- and growth -- are on the eastern side in a stretch of development that runs from Colorado Springs to Denver and beyond.

Starting in the 1930s, the state and the federal Bureau of Reclamation developed a complex system of reservoirs, aqueducts and mountain tunnels to ship water to the eastern side of the Continental Divide.

The Big Straw would reach farther, pulling water through a 10-foot-wide pipe all the way from Colorado’s westernmost border. The pipeline would climb 4,000 to 5,600 feet over the Rockies, higher than California’s most grandiose projects. Although the State Water Project in California sends water a greater distance -- 600 miles south to Los Angeles from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta -- its rise across the Tehachapi Mountains is no more than 2,000 feet.

By waiting to tap the river after western Colorado has used what it wants, the Big Straw would avoid many messy in-state water brawls. But removing at least several hundred thousand acre-feet of water annually -- an acre-foot would supply two Southern California households for a year -- could change the nature of the river in the downstream states.

There would be much less flow for the river’s four endangered fish species, for the huge reservoirs that store water for the Lower Basin, and for the rafting outfitters who play a significant role in Utah’s recreation economy.

“We think it’s horrible. It could put the river-running industry at risk,” warned John Weisheit, conservation director of Living Rivers in Moab, Utah, and a member of several river outfitter boards. “It is going to be a huge burden to the taxpayer, when the more reasonable alternative is conservation.”

The proposal has its critics in Colorado as well.

“I don’t think average, everyday Coloradans want to pay through the nose for a project like this,” said state Sen. Terry Phillips, a Democrat from the Denver suburb of Louisville who scoffed at the Big Straw as an extravagant fantasy when the Legislature appropriated funding for the preliminary study. “It’s ridiculous.”

At the Colorado Canyons National Conservation Area, manager Greg Gnesios fears the pipeline’s massive infrastructure could blight the scenic red rock canyons of the 123,000-acre tract bordering the river at the state’s western edge.

“It’s almost like putting it through the national park,” Gnesios said. “That could create some problems for the Big Straw folks.”

Dan Luecke, a hydrologist who works for several Colorado environmental groups, doubts that the scheme will survive close scrutiny.

“I think an evenhanded study will drive a stake in its heart,” he said. “It’s a bad idea. It will be enormously expensive. It will require an enormous amount of energy to pump that water. It will have incredible water quality problems.”

Born amid the 13,000-foot peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, the Colorado is far from pristine when it hits the Utah border. Often it resembles a giant, murky irrigation ditch.

On its course down the western slope of the Rockies, the river picks up salts and selenium from the riverbed and farm runoff, as well as urban effluent. The river’s salinity levels at the Utah border are 10 times greater than they are at its headwaters. Selenium levels at times exceed state standards. If pumped untreated to high-country reservoirs on its way to the Front Range, the border water would be warmer and dirtier than the supplies into which it is piped, lowering overall water quality.

“From our standpoint, that is the biggest concern,” David Nickum, executive director of the Colorado Council of Trout Unlimited, said as he stood near a mountain reservoir that flows into a trout-fishing river. “If you envision taking a large amount of water out of the Colorado and bringing it up here, it’s hard to imagine the magnitude of the change [in quality] or the magnitude of treatment.”

Using more water in the Colorado’s Upper Basin also means that less water would reach the Lower Basin, where California has been sucking more than its share from the river for nearly half a century.

It could do so because the other six Western states that draw from the Colorado didn’t need their full allocations. But as the West grows, that is changing. Arizona and Nevada have both begun to use their full river entitlements in the last three years.

“Now the reason there are surpluses is because the Upper Basin states have not developed their allocations,” observed Jerry Zimmerman, executive director of the Colorado River Board of California. “In the future, there will not be surpluses nearly as frequently.”

Nor is there as much water in the Colorado as everybody thought when the river’s flow was divvied up between the Upper and Lower basins in a 1922 interstate compact.

Hydrologists had figured that 18 million acre-feet of water a year spilled down the river’s rock-walled canyons to the Gulf of Mexico. But that estimate, based on a wet period, turned out to be too high by about 3 million acre-feet a year. The average river flow is in fact less than the total legally allotted to the seven basin states and Mexico.

“If you have a river overcommitted, then the chances of getting shortages are there. That’s why you need to look at more effective ways of doing things,” said the MWD’s Underwood.

Ironically, the Big Straw idea grew out of love of another river. Ralph Clark III, a private environmental planner, first proposed it in the late 1980s as a way of protecting the headwaters of the Gunnison River in western Colorado. Better, he thought, to take water from the Colorado at the state border than divert the upper reaches of his beloved Gunnison to the east side of the Rockies.

But even Clark is not yet prepared to endorse its construction. He thinks of the Big Straw, which he more mundanely calls the Colorado Aqueduct Return Project, as a last resort.

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Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.