Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is calling for more man-made floods to be released from the Glen Canyon Dam into the Colorado River in an effort to protect wildlife and archaeological sites.
The flooding builds up sandbars and beaches along a 277-mile stretch of the river as it runs through the Grand Canyon. Salazar announced last week in a video message to the Colorado River Water Users Association in Las Vegas that his department would head up an effort to determine when and how high-flow experiments should be conducted.
Environmentalists have decried the experiments as meaningless without a plan for more steady flows and say the flooding better serves the interests of hydropower than natural resources. The last high-flow experiment in 2008 sent torrents of water from the dam on the Arizona-Utah line for 60 hours to mimic natural flooding. The results were short-lived; newly built up sandbars eroded within months.
