Climate Change's Cycle of Disaster in Arid West Impacts Watersheds for Multiple Years
Paula Stepp1
1Middle Colorado Watershed Council, Rifle, CO, USA; pstepp@midcowatershed.org
In August 2020, the larger impact of the change in climate reared its head in the Middle Colorado River watershed. While stakeholders wrapped up two-and-a-half years of designing a stream management plan, two wildfires started to burn in the watershed. The Grizzly Creek fire quickly shut down I-70 that runs through Glenwood Canyon for more than two weeks with a devastating impact to the canyon and to the already covid-damaged tourist economy of the region. On the western side of the watershed, the state’s third largest fire in 2020 was impacting the middle and lower Colorado watersheds. The city of Glenwood public water infrastructure relied on water from No Name and Grizzly Creek as a primary source and started working on mitigation as soon as the fire started burning. State and federal aid helped Glenwood put in millions of dollars to update the intake system and the water plant which was completed in time for the 2021 debris flows and an additional two-week canyon shutdown in 2021. The damage from the debris flow to the Interstate and the impact that was felt far beyond our watershed brought the federal emergency management team to the canyon to help solve the immediate crisis of repair and transportation. Our communities on the middle and lower Colorado as well as Colorado Parks and Wildlife will need to resolve the consistent sediment and turbidity in the river that will impact infrastructure, drinking water and our aquatic population for years to come. While the long-term regional drought continues to impact our municipal, agriculture and recreation communities in this area, the second and third tier impacts of fire and flooding exacerbate the problems caused by low soil moisture and low water flows. In this presentation, we will discuss the above climate-related impacts and how Middle Colorado Watershed Council is going about better understanding what climate change means for the middle Colorado River and how our organization is adapting our mission and priorities.