The Denver Water Board made itself even more unpopular in Summit County last week when it closed the Dillon Dam road to motor vehicles, on grounds of security.
Denver Water has never been well liked up there. One day about 30 years ago I was riding around Summit County with a friend who was a local cop. We were driving up Colorado 9 from Frisco toward Breckenridge and a Denver Water pickup passed, headed the other way. “That’s outrageous,” my cop friend hollered, as he made a fast U-turn and activated his lights and siren.
“Outrageous?” I asked, looking for my seat belt as we shot down the road.
“How dare they drive around here in broad daylight,” he proclaimed as the truck pulled over. He got out and checked license, paperwork and every light bulb and tire tread, eventually finding some excuse to write a ticket. “Anything we can do to slow them down and make their work of taking our water more difficult,” my friend explained as we pulled away 20 minutes later, “is a service to the residents of Summit County.”
So in closing the dam road, Denver Water didn’t have to worry about alienating Summit County. That job was done years ago. But it is hard to imagine just how closing the road will improve security. After all, a terrorist could pollute Denver’s water supply from a boat on the lake.
As for blowing up the dam, I looked into that once for a novel I never finished. Dillon Dam is an massive earth-fill structure. I consulted with explosives experts who had bad attitudes (i.e., laid-off miners), and they told me that you couldn’t do serious damage even with a semi load of conventional explosives on the dam road. You’d need a nuke, along the lines of Steven Hannon’s 1997 novel “Glen Canyon,” and terrorists with that kind of firepower would presumably find more prominent targets.
This is not Denver Water’s first security closure. Along U.S. 285 near Grant, there is the east portal of the Roberts Tunnel, which conveys water from Dillon Reservoir. At the tunnel mouth, there used to be a nice pullover, complete with restrooms and some space to walk around. It was so handy on trips when we had small children that I began to think kindly of Denver Water. Then one day concrete security barriers went up to block the parking area.
But in light of the dam road closure, is that enough? It might be best to close the highway from Bailey to the top of Kenosha Pass, or at least conduct security inspections of all vehicles passing those two points.
Another soft spot is U.S. 40 at Winter Park as it passes the west portal of the Moffat Tunnel. It has two bores, one for trains and the other for Denver Water, as evidenced by that big pipe in plain sight. The way to protect it under the new Denver Water security protocol, obviously, is to close the highway.
What of that rail route, though? As it is, anybody can buy a ticket on the westbound California Zephyr, which passes Gross Reservoir, a Denver Water facility, before entering the Moffat Tunnel.
Remember the 1995 Steven Seagal movie, “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory,” wherein terrorists got control of a passenger train westbound from Denver? Is it time to close all routes into the mountains to protect Denver Water?
But look at the bright side. If Denver Water can close various relevant roads, Coloradans won’t be able to drive nearly as much. Thus we’ll conserve gasoline, something that might actually improve the nation’s security.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
