floodway and enhance the opportunity to use lands along the river without flood threat by increasing the reservoir capacity required to be available for flood control storage on January 1 of each year. This could be done, of course, only at the expense of conservation of water for beneficial consumptive use. In this connection, it is relevant that a recent report of the Bureau of Reclamation indicates that the storage capacity presently available in the Upper Basin is marginally adequate to control the river to the extent necessary to implement utilization of the Upper Basin's allocation of the waters of the river. Section 602 (a) of Public Law 90-537 requires the Secretary of the Interior to make releases from Lake Powell as required to meet the terms of the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and to store water in Lake Powell as necessary to assure deliveries in accordance with the Compact without impairment of annual consumptive uses in the Upper Basin pursuant to the Compact. Water in Lake Powell not required to be stored for those purposes must be released to maintain as nearly as practicable active storage in Lake Mead equal to the active storage in Lake Powell with the release rates set on the basis of forecasts to achieve equalization on September 30 of each year.

If Lower Basin interests do want to dedicate additional capacity in Lake Mead to flood control storage, New Mexico could agree to that dedication upon a deletion of the equalization requirement of Section 602 (a) of Public Law 90-537 and Article II, Paragraph (3) (b) of the Criteria for the Coordinated Long Range Operation of Colorado River Reservoirs promulgated pursuant to that Act.

In the short term, releases in excess of downstream requirements to evacuate space in Lake Mead for flood control would almost certainly reduce the water available for the Central Arizona Project, now scheduled to commence operation in late 1985, and for California users. However, in the long term, a substantial reduction in the capacity available for conservation storage at Lake Mead would increase the supply available for the Central Arizona Project, by reducing evaporation. Regulation of the river flow at Lake Powell to meet the Upper Division States' obligation under Article III (d) of the Compact would provide the regulation needed for beneficial consumptive use in the Lower Basin and the requirements of the Mexican Treaty of 1944.

Mr. Chairman, the opportunity to present this statement on behalf

of the State of New Mexico is greatly appreciated.

STATEMENT OF

THE STATE OF UTAH'

concerning

Colorado River Operations

before the

Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs

U. S. House of Representatives

September 7, 1983

Yuma, Arizona

My name is Daniel F. Lawrence, and I ar giving this statement on

behalf of the State of Utah. I am Director of the Division of Water

Resources, and Utah's Commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission.

I am sure all of you have read the newspapers and watched

television, and are well aware that we in Utah know what flooding is and

'Delivered by Daniel F. Lawrence, Director - Utah Division of

Water Resources, and Interstate Streams Commissioner for Utah.

have first-hand knowledge of the damage and heartbreak it can cause. We

are definitely not unsympathetic to those who have suffered from

flooding, nor are we unmindful of other less dramatic but perhaps equally

important aspects of flooding.

As an engineer and long-time water resources manager in an arid

state, I am forced, albeit unwillingly, to look at flooding and flood

control in a larger perspective. Because of the random nature of

precipitation and streamflow, managing a river system efficiently is

always a matter of tradeoffs and a matter of risks. All we can say with

surety about a given flood is that sooner or later we'll have a bigger

one.

There is no such thing as 100% protection.

A complicating factor in the arid West is that we must capture and

hold for future use all the runoff that we can. If we think we're going

to get runoff beyond the reservoir capacity, we make releases to give

more storage space. If we have guessed wrong and released too much, we

face in July and August the wrath (and often the lawsuits) of downstream

water users. If we release too little, we soon have flows exceeding the

channel capacity, with consequent downstream property damage.

The keys, of course, are (1) good forecasting of runoff, and (2) a

flood control plan that has been established with widespread public input

and is understood and accepted by all affected politically responsible

entities.

There has been considerable testimony already about the quality of

the forecast for the 1983 runoff season in the Colorado Basin. My

hydrologic staff has carefully reviewed the forecasting procedure and the

data input used by the National Weather Service and the Colorado River

Forecasting Service, and are convinced that the forecast could not have

been significantly improved, within the present state-of-the-art.

A reliable hydrologic model can be constructed and validated only

on the basis of available historical data. The 1983 flood event has no

precedent in recorded history, and even if the temperature and

precipitation could have been forecasted perfectly, the model could not

have processed this information to produce a reasonable forecast. We

just did not have any historical streamflow data with which to verify the

model's reliability in predicting runoff from such an extraordinary

sequence of events.

In spite of the fact the runoff event was technically unpredict

able, how did the flood control plan reservoir operating system perfom?

I feel that we can only say it performed very well. The February 1981

Flood Control Regulation for the Colorado River Basin and Hoover Dam has

as a goal to maintain flow below Davis Dam to 40,000 ft/sec or less,

insofar as possible. The maximum release from Davis reached during the

3

1983 flood was 45,000 ft /sec on July 2, even though the April-June

snowmelt runoff was an unprecedented 14.8 million acre-feet, or more than

210% of average.

Glen Canyon Dam, which was constructed for water conservation and

power production, has no formal target objectives for maximum releases.

In spite of this, the USER operated Glen Canyon in such a manner that the

inflow to Lake Mead was reduced significantly. As an example, maximum

inflow to Lake Powell was 116,000 ft /sec on June 28, while on that

same day releases were held to 58,000.

The oft-repeated statement in various forums and in the press has

been, "If the Bureau of Reclamation did such a good job, why was there so

much damage?"

Part of the damage was obviously due to the fact that the

system was not designed for complete protection from such an