As a mathematically inclined person, my instinct is to look for data to understand a problem. One very clear problem is the disappearance of the Great Salt Lake due to an excessive use of water for farming, particularly alfalfa farming. But this has been written about at length and involves politics that are beyond my pay grade.
Instead, I want to tell you about something strange that I can understand, namely an anomaly in the water level at the Strawberry Reservoir.
I was delighted to recently find a website in a search as I’ve been trying to figure out by just how much our most recent two years will help to put off the Great Salt Lake crisis. It has been great fun to infer indirectly about how water managers release water from the reservoirs in advance of big snow melts by looking at the numbers. I highly recommend that anyone with more than a passing interest in data peruse the inflows into the lake and the percent of capacity of the water levels in our reservoirs.
One anomaly I’ve come across leaves me scratching my head. This relatively big water year following a year that filled our local water reservoirs should mean that the reservoirs are lowering their levels in anticipation of the melt — and this is certainly reflected, for example, in the level of the Jordanelle Reservoir.
But Strawberry Reservoir, one of our biggest, which feeds into Utah Lake and then to Great Salt Lake through the Jordan River, is holding on to its water in a real departure from previous years.
The graph (available at the website listed above) is actually somewhat alarming. Why is the water retained instead of being allowed to flow into Utah Lake and then into our Great Salt Lake?
Our legislators have floated ideas of piping water from the Pacific Ocean, and yet right now, in this big water year, Strawberry is hoarding its water. It makes no sense to me, and I wish someone could explain this. If we are going to work on the GSL, then we need to take advantage of wet years even as we plan ahead for conservation efforts that will presumably involve altering our farming and metro water-use patterns.
Aaron Bertram, Salt Lake City