Floyd Dominy, 1909-2010

Click on the photo of Glen Canyon Dam to enlarge the image, or click on the Dominy napkin sketch of the same thing for a beautiful account of a 1997 dinner at the former Reclamation commissioner's home by Glen Canyon Institute president Richard Ingebretsen. "We met at his house in the afternoon. On his several acre property were over one dozen dams; he is a beaver to be sure," Ingebretsen wrote.

“Floyd Dominy, who made it his mission to improve nature by, among other things, damming the Colorado River at Glen Canyon and creating the more user-friendly Lake Powell, has died at the age of 100,” reports the High Country News.

“Some had hoped that Glen Canyon Dam would go first … ” To keep reading click here.

Click on the birthday invitation for a remembrance of Dominy by the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Glen Canyon Dam and the pill from MIT

This one is strictly for water wonks. Now that I’ve cleared the room, Richard Spotts of the Great Basin Water Network alerted me to this paper from the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law. “Collaborative Planning and Adaptive Management in Glen Canyon: A Cautionary Tale” looks at the impact of changing environmental regulation on the operations of the second largest dam on the Colorado River. It then wades through the on-going efforts to resolve the succession of shit storms that followed the 1956 construction of Glen Canyon Dam.

The authors, two from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the third from the University of California, Irvine write, “The Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program should not be considered a success because it has failed to address effectively the concerns that led to its creation in the first place, including:  (1) developing a stakeholder-supported operating plan responsive to increased understanding; (2)

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    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com
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