Environment | Bill's Views on Most Everything

Category Archives: Environment

Shaking and Baking

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

As you are aware if you are a regular reader of my ravings, I am a geology buff. I like the Big Picture, mid-ocean rifts and rises, tectonic plates shoving one another around, places where the hot insides spout out of the ground, mountains rising and being worn away, and the oceans becoming ever more salty. Most of the time, all this is a slow process, but sometimes all hell breaks loose.

San Andreas Fault

Just look at that photo of the San Andreas Fault. Things are clearly on the move and the land is being torn apart. The Pacific Plate is sliding northward along the North American Plate. Pasadena will one day be next to Anchorage. Don’t wait up for it, though. The Pacific coast of North America is one of the most seismically active regions on the Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific Ocean. It shakes, it blows, it smokes, it flows.

Places like that make nice places to live. Most of the time. There is the ocean, lots of pretty landscapes with beautiful mountains nearby, and places to grow things. Just look at the Seattle-Tacoma area. Bays, inlets, rivers, islands, and a big old mountain to look at. It is easy to forget that mountain is a large volcano just biding it’s time until it lets loose again.

Mount Rainier. Close to Town

If Rainier resembles Mt. St. Helens in the way it erupts, there might be some warning. What we won’t know is how big, exactly when, and for how long. There is a lot going on in that area. Boeing, Microsoft, REI, millions of people, and Starbucks are a few examples. If a swarm of magnitude four earthquakes begin, what to do? Shut everything down and evacuate? Where will everyone go? What about looting and plundering? What if it doesn’t erupt for months, if ever?

Pyroclastic flows of very hot, wet, chunky stuff have flowed off that mountain all the way to the ocean. The old cliche says “It is not if, but when.” We just do not know when. So, life along the Pacific Rim is always something of a gamble. I have felt small earthquakes and looked into the crater of a Volcano in Costa Rica, a lovely, green, paradise. Earthquakes destroy roads and railroads, volcanos bury villages, and life goes on.

Irazu, Costa Rica

Small, poor Costa Rica is one thing, the Seattle-Tacoma area, or Los Angeles, or Portland, or Eugene, or San Francisco are entirely different matters. No amount of preparation can take into account all the things which might happen. Prediction is in its infancy. Mt. St. Helens in hindsight gave lots of warning, but the disaster was huge in a relatively isolated area. When Rainier or Mt. Hood let go the disaster will be in a heavily populated area with just a few ways out.

Currently there are lots of earthquakes in the oil field regions of Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding areas. I wouldn’t worry too much if I lived there, the odds of a Big One are fairly small. St. Louis and Salt Lake are at more risk. The West Coast is the big danger zone. The earth will keep moving, the plates will continue to slide. Eruptions and quakes will continue to happen. My solution? Don’t live there. What is your plan?

Posted in Apocalyptic Prophesies, Cliches, Earthquakes, Environment, Fear, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Volcanos

King Coal’s Crown is Slipping

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Idle Coal Car

Recently I have done a couple of road trips where I paralleled abandoned or seldom used railroads. On one trip I came down the Arkansas from Salida to Pueblo, years ago the main line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The other route was from Alamosa to Walsenburg, the route of the Rio Grande to the San Luis Valley and on to Gunnison over Marshall Pass.

On both trips the lower portion of the railroad grade had literally miles of parked gondolas, or coal cars. The gondolas on the Arkansas were the old-fashioned steel cars. Those cars are replaced by mostly aluminum cars which are significantly lighter. The railroads make more money hauling coal instead of heavy steel cars. Dropping down to Walsenburg were miles of the more modern aluminum cars holding air rather than coal.

The railroads have lost a huge amount of coal hauling business. All over the country, coal mines are shutting down, the coal replaced by cheaper natural gas. Not all the coal trains are gone, I saw one yesterday on its way south through Denver.

Colorado Springs Power Plant With Idle Coal Cars

Colorado Springs has a socialist Utilities Department, generating power and delivering natural gas along with the traditional water and wastewater systems. The big power plant south of the city used to burn so much coal the city bought its own coal train. All those cars are idle, sitting at the power plant. Now, it is natural gas powering the generators.

Colorado has a colorful coal mining history. The Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill in Pueblo got its coal from mines just west of Trinidad. That region had lots of mines accompanied by lots of labor trouble around the turn of the twentieth century. There were mines in Colorado Springs, west of Denver, a big industry around Louisville and Lafayette. The mines at Somerset, just north of Paonia are in the process of shutting down. Craig and Hayden are in trouble, and the mines in the Grand Junction region are long gone.

“Clean Coal”, a big lie if there ever was one, is on its way out. Peabody Energy is bankrupt, along with many other mine operators. We will have coal’s legacy for a long time. Climate change, fouled rivers and air, areas mutilated by strip mining, and huge piles of mine waste are our children’s inheritance.

Alternative energy, including solar power and wind generation are part of the equation, but cheap and more clean burning natural gas is the main reason for the change. Gas is cleaner than coal, but it still puts huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is just another fossil fuel. The fossil fuels sequestered huge amounts of carbon that otherwise would contribute to global warming. Now we are burning all that carbon and heating up the planet.

Gas is better, but still bad. All that cheap cleaner burning gas may even slow the transition to renewable energy sources. On balance, however, we are better off with gas than coal.

Where is all that cheap gas coming from? There has been a major technological advance in the oil and gas industry. The advance is horizontal drilling. In past years, one hole went into the ground and the oil and gas was extracted froze around that single hole. The amount recovered was highly dependent on the porosity of the rock formation holding the oil and gas.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking), developed in the 1950’s expanded the amount removed from less porous strata, but not on a huge scale. To get more out of any field with tight rock required lots of expensive drill holes.

The big change was the development of horizontal drilling. The process took years of development, but now slant drilling is cost effective and allows hydraulic fracturing over a much wider area compared to down hole drilling. Fracking the slanted holes allows gas and oil to be extracted from oil and gas bearing shales formerly not economically feasible.

There is much opposition to fracking because the technology allows drilling in new areas where the population is not used to a dirty industry in their back yards. Traditionally, the industry did not pay much attention to leaking wells. There was little regulation, and all that stuff went into the atmosphere. The oil fields in the Four Corners region are the source of the highest atmospheric methane readings in the country.

Leaks are common because it costs money to prevent them, lowering profits. The leaks can be prevented, it just takes more work and money. The big blowout in the Gulf shows that oil companies tend to cheat when the dangerous practices are taking place where no one can see them. On-site regulation can stop the cheating and oil and gas production from horizontal drilling and fracking can continue safely.

The downside is the clear need to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, not increase the amount. Until more alternative sources come on line, natural gas is preferable to coal, and King Coal can be deposed. The current difficulty in making the transition is political, with the extractive industries resisting the change at every step. They are spending money to delay the changes that could be used to make change, not enrich politicians and the advertising industry.

Residential Solar Power

We have solar panels on our house and garage. Out utility bill this month will be less than twenty dollars. Xcel Energy is attempting to eliminate the incentives for home solar power so they can continue to produce power using natural gas. It’s political, folks.

Posted in Coal, Energy Policy, Environment, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

Cleaning the Water

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Building The Marston Plant a While Back

I spent 30 years in the water treatment industry. Most of it was water treatment, but I put in three years in as a wastewater treatment operator. The goal of both jobs is to make dirty water clean. The processes are different, and the standards for the product differ, but the idea is to make the water safe for humans. I wouldn’t recommend drinking wastewater plant effluent, but you can swim in it. Water, you can drink, except in Flint.

What about the stuff taken out of the water in order to make it safe? In both instances the stuff is called sludge. Sludge is nasty. There are several kinds of wastewater sludge, some nastier than others. The first step takes out the stuff that sinks. In a wastewater plant, that stuff is the nastiest. I once fell in a pit of primary sludge, injured a finger, and lost it to infection. In Spanish, my nickname is Nueve.

There are several techniques to deal with wastewater sludge to render it more benign, but it still tends to stink. (By any other name, it’s still shit.). That sludge ends up on farmland or as compost. Water plant sludge is treated differently, but gets used the same way.

Water Filters

I spent sixteen years with Denver Water in the Marston treatment plant. It is fed by Marston Lake with water from the South Platte River. Most of the time South Platte water is high quality Rocky Mountain water. At other times, the Rockies get unruly and send some dirty stuff down. The treatment plants have to handle it all. Water treatment is known as a physical-chemical process. A chemical, usually aluminum sulfate is added to the water to make bigger pieces out of the sometimes microscopic pieces that must be removed (bacteria, viruses, cysts, silt, etc.).

Then, the water goes into a big tank where those bigger pieces tend to sink to the bottom. Machinery of some sort scrapes the settled sludge out and sends it to be treated further.

The settled water then goes to the filters where almost everything is removed. Next step, chlorine to kill all the little nasties that make people sick. Then it goes down the pipe to town.

Sludge

What about all the sludge? Lots of things are in the lake water. Birds, fish, even small organisms create waste products that can be dangerous as well as unpleasant (shit). It is mostly water, but the solids have to be dealt with. At Marston, it goes into a big underground tank and accumulates until it gets removed, dewatered, and hauled away for compost making.

The tank is 20 feet deep, 50 feet wide, and about 150 feet long. After accumulating for a year, the tank is about six feet deep with sludge. Now, water plant sludge is not as nasty as wastewater sludge. Some of it is chemical, clay minerals as the end product of all that aluminum sulfate. But, there are lots of organics as well. When they sit for much of a year in an airless environment, they decompose into stinky stuff. That stinky stuff also gives off hydrogen sulfide gas (the rotten egg smell). H2S and water make sulfuric acid, not good for lungs.

To get rid of that huge gob of stuff, we had to get down there with fire hoses, air monitors, and gas masks. Nasty work and a contrast with our normal routine of lab work, monitoring the computerized systems, and doing routine maintenance. Dirty work with those hoses, but kind of fun as well.

Belt Filter Press

We used those hoses to carve sludge. We would make channels, wash down walls of goo, bore holes, make it spatter our coworkers, and other exciting activities. The whole process took a couple of days. The sludge then went to a thickener eh are much of the water drained off the surface and the sludge drained out the bottom. Then, on to the belt filter press. That thing looks like a big printing press. The sludge goes between two five foot wide belts that go over and under a succession of rollers that squeeze much of the water out. The resulting cake goes up into big hoppers and then into trucks, and hauled to the compost making facility. In the old days all that stuff went into the river. Now, it is a useful product. Pretty cool, eh?

Posted in Environment, Flint Water, My Story, Sludge, Water Treatment, Water Treatment Plants

Weather

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Climate Change

2013 Flood

There is currently a lot of controversy about climate change and whether humankind has a role in the warming trend. While I think it is true that pouring huge amounts of sequestered carbon is the culprit, I don’t think it matters much for us here in Colorado and much of the west.

We live in a land of extremes except for the rainy Pacific Northwest, but, they have their earthquakes and volcanos. Here in Colorado, we dwell in a land of extremes. The west is dry, it snows in the mountains, the Front Range is kind of a mix, and it is pretty dry in the east. That varies from year to year. It varies a lot.

In the late nineteenth century it was a wet cycle in the eastern prairie, and the railroads made millions enticing settlers to buy their land and get rich farming. The population in eastern Colorado peaked then and has been declining ever since. The mountain ski areas have lots of snow some years and almost no snow other years. The western desert country looks dry and desolate most of the time, but I have seen it bloom in a stunning variety of color.

Then there are the floods, blizzards, and tornados, often followed by drought. The one thing we can count on is change. There are long term trends. Most archeologists think one reason the ancestral Pueblo Indians left southwestern Colorado was a prolonged drought cycle. Anyone who tries to raise dry land beans in that country can tell you not much has changed.

2013 Flood

Here along the base of the mountains we have the extremes as well. There was the drought of 2002, and the floods of 2013. The mountains create an unusual weather pattern that stalls along the mountain front, bringing more moisture than the land can handle. That is when lots of the mountains wash out into the flat country. It has been going on for more than sixty million years. The gravel in the Platte River in Nebraska is Rocky Mountain gravel. Some of the Louisiana mud is Long’s peak mud.

Some climate models say climate change is going to dry Colorado out, other models say it will be wetter. My money is on more extreme weather. Longer, more violent wet periods and long droughts. Look for more frequent floods, not the thirty or forty year cycle we have had since the first European-American settlers and miners arrived. Think about the tornados and hailstorms recently.

I like the extremes. We have our regular four seasons here but the winters are milder than in Iowa. It can get hot but there are few days over one hundred degrees, but not like southeastern Utah. I think that may change, hotter in the summer. I don’t think the winters will be colder. I can remember forty below in Boulder when I was flunking out of CU. Twenty below seems to be more the cold winter norm now. What I do not like is the hailstorms. I don’t think the insurance companies like them much either. Homeowners insurance costs keep rising. That hail is hard on the garden as well. We had only one tomato plant survive last year.

One of the big impacts of climate change will be on water supplies. The amount of precipitation may not change, but if it is warmer, the snowpacks will not last as long in the spring. That means more spring floods and a shorter runoff period, which will impact water storage. That could be bad news for the populated Front Range. People keep coming, but there will not be more water, and a lot of the big spring runoff will go out of the state. That will be good for the Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska, but bad for Parker and Highlands ranch.

I spent a long time in the water business, and it always disturbed me watching all that high quality drinking water being used to attempt to replicate Surrey or Connecticut foliage in the Great American Desert. All that bluegrass will have to go. The urban forest will have more drought-hardy trees. Denver Water’s customers have done a good job of conserving since the big drought of 2002, but the bluegrass model of landscaping continues. In Denver, daily water consumption is about 110 million gallons per day in winter. I the hot part of summer, it’s over 400 million gallons per day, most of it run out onto the ground.

At our house, we have significantly reduced the size of our lawn, but we still have a lot of crabgrass. It should be buffalo grass and blue grama, both native drought-resistant grasses. They don’t stay green all summer, so we are stalling and paying the water bill. Marijuana legalization is bringing lots of people to Colorado, and the economy is booming. Those people use water, and lots of water is used growing the stuff. One of the unintended consequences of legalizing pot is increased water consumption.

Myself, I am not too concerned about climate change for myself. After all I am 73 years old and don’t live on the coast. Long term change is a reality, but as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long range we are all dead”.

Posted in Colorado, Earthquakes, Environment, Floods, Hailstorm, Money, Rain, Spring Flowers, Stories, Volcanos, Water Treatment, Weather, Winter

Flint Water

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Bill One comment

Flint Water

After 30 years in the water industry, I thought I should give my take on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. There is a misconception that the water from the Flint River the state emergency manager switched to is poisonous. Not true. Properly treated, the Flint River water is fine, and would meet all safe drinking water standards.

The problem is that the water was not properly treated. As it comes from the river, the water is corrosive and attacks metals in the distribution system pipes. To be safe, it must be treated to make it less corrosive. There are chemical additives (phosphates) that coat the pipes and prevent lead and copper from leaching into the water. Here in Denver, lime or soda ash are added to raise the pH of the water, making it less corrosive. In addition, over time a thin film of calcium carbonate forms on the inside of the pipes, effectively sequestering the toxic metals. The phosphate chemicals do the same thing.

How can you tell if your water is safe? The corrosive water also attacks the rust that forms in an old system, such as in Denver or Flint. If your water is red, it has rust, but also lead and copper. The lead and copper come from the pipes, not the river. The rust won’t hurt you, just stain your fixtures. The lead comes from lead solder (now outlawed) used to join copper pipes and from lead pipes once used to bring water from the main into the house. The lead service lines are slowly going away, but many houses have galvanized steel pipes into the house. These are safe, but that steel pipe won’t bend to attach to the tap on the main, which is high on the pipe to keep sediment out of the service line. The solution, a flexible lead loop bending from the tap to the service line.

Corroded Pipe

In Denver some older houses have lead service lines, but the lead loops are more common. My entire neighborhood in South Denver with houses dating from the Victorian era to the 1940’s has lead loops. Most of them are replaced when the old galvanized pipes rust out and there is a leak. Our house has a copper service line now. Several houses on the block have had their old service lines replaced since we have lived there. Look where the water line comes into your house. If it is copper, you are OK. Flint has the same situation.

Aggressive water leaches lead and copper out of the pipes and renders the water toxic. Lead is the most dangerous, as it is a neurotoxin especially dangerous for developing fetuses and young children. Copper is also toxic, but copper pipes are more resistant to corrosion than lead.

If you have red water in your house, it is possibly dangerous and needs to be tested. The Flint water is not just red, it’s red mud. Before the Safe Drinking Water Act, many small water systems had aggressive water. As a kid, I watched red water flow into our bathtub, especially in the spring, when the water was mostly runoff. Maybe that is why I am nuts, as well as the rest of us from Fruita.

How did this happen in Flint? Flint has a treatment plant, but was using water from Detroit which has good corrosion control. Flint has plans to switch from the Flint River to Lake Huron as their water source. Lake Huron water is higher quality than river water, making it less expensive to treat. Detroit water is from Lake Huron. The Michigan emergency manager for Flint ordered the switch to river water to save money.

Flint is broke. The demise of much of the U.S. Auto industry hit Flint hard, a General Motors town. The result, white flight, leaving a population mostly poor and black. The city couldn’t pay its bills and the state took over with a team appointed by the Governor. Here is the root of the problem. The federal Safe Drinking Water Act establishes standards for drinking water. The law gives the states the option to administer the law, usually by the Health Department or the Environmental Quality Department.

So, the State government is running the Flint government and water treatment process and is also charged with insuring the water is safe, a clear conflict of interest. A wild card? Racism. Those poor black people did not have much political clout and were essentially ignored and belittled when they complained about their water. It took a brave pediatrician seeing high lead levels in her patients to finally get action.

Four governmental entities are involved. The Flint city government was rendered superfluous when the state assumed control. The federal EPA was passing the buck to the Michigan Environmental Quality Department and not doing due diligence in making sure the department was doing its job (the EPA administrator lost his job). The state environmental quality regulators knew there was a problem, but were influenced by the Governor’s emergency management. The result, a perfect bureaucratic storm, with the people of Flint as victims.

The cost? A public health crisis that will cost millions to fix. It takes a long time for the calcium carbonate or phosphate coating to form in the pipes. In the meantime the water is unsafe. The people of Flint will have to be provided with bottled water for some time. Lots of bureaucratic fingers are being pointed. There is plenty of blame to go around. Will anyone go to jail? Probably not, even though there is now a special prosecutor. If the local Flint city government had been simply subsidized by the state until it got its house in order, the whole thing could probably been avoided. Instead the emergency managers put money ahead of the public health.

Many conservatives want to reduce the size of government, and return to the nineteenth century, before there was water treatment and people died of waterborne disease. Government built a system to protect public health. If government does not have the money do do its job, the public health will suffer. Do you want safe water? Don’t move to Flint.

Posted in Environment, Flint Water, Health Issues, Lead Poisoning, Money, Politics, Stories, Water Treatment

The Colorado Plateau Part Two

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Colorado Plateau Country

There is a lot of beautiful country on the Colorado Plateau, but there is the other side. The term many use is the stinking desert. My home town has an annual rainfall of about eight inches. Before the Utes were run out and ditches were dug, the Grand Valley was a sparse desert. The irrigation projects made much of the valley green, but north of the Highline Canal is the desert. It is a fairly barren desert, not like the Sonoran Desert with its green saguaro cactus.

Mancos Shale Soil

The soil, if you can call it that, is fairly infertile, high in salts, and high in toxic selenium. It’s called the Mancos Shale. The Mancos Shale, called the Pierre Shale east of the Rockies, runs from South Dakota to central Utah. It is an ancient sea floor, Cretaceous in age, of the inland sea covering much of North America. Shale is mud rock, laid down as the sea advanced and retreated over millions of years.

The lower part of the Bookcliffs and the valley floors are Mancos Shale. In its natural state it is a scrub grassland, supporting small populations of deer, antelope, prairie dogs, sage grouse, cottontails, and some Bison. When the Northern European Americans arrived, they saw grazing land. The sheep and cattle came. The ranchers did well for a few years, but their expectations were unrealistic for such a dry area. Soon, most of the good grass was gone, replaced by cheat grass and sagebrush.

The area between Delta and Grand Junction is a prime example. My father, born in 1903, lived in Grand Junction after 1918. He told me that at that time, there were extensive stands of tall bunch grasses. They are gone. That desert is one of the most barren stretches I am aware of. It is hilly, so irrigation water went to flatter areas. It is close to towns, so lots of ranchers grazed their stock on the land.

Much of the Mancos shale country is BLM land today. In the old days, the Land Office and the Grazing Service leased land to ranchers. There were allocations on the number of head allowed on each segment, but there was little enforcement. The grass mostly disappeared. Thus, the stinking desert.

I-70 from Palisade to the west of Green River, Utah is on the Mancos. Highway Six from where I-70 veers south almost all the way to Price is on the Mancos. Travelers on those highways have the bare Bookcliffs and the bare desert floor to look at for over 200 miles. Their impression was what tended to keep the canyon country to the south relatively isolated. Locals had all that magnificent country mostly to themselves.

Art in Salt Creek Canyon

The a uranium and oil and gas booms of the 1950s built a large network of roads and opened the canyon country up for tourism. Those flat deserts remain empty, along with the mostly shale country of the Bookcliffs and the Tavaputs Plateau to the North.

When I went to Arches in the 1950s, we drove down two tracks winding through the sand. This year during the height of the season, cars were lined up literally for miles. Canyonlands National Park is also crowded, people lined up. I remember going there and often seeing no one.

From Green River to Hanksville is mostly flat, dry desert, with 70 miles from the highway turnoff to the Maze District Ranger Station in Canyonlands. The greater part of Navajo country in southern Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona is fairly flat desert. Monument Valley is flat desert that happens to have some rocks sticking up. Have you ever driven from Albuquerque to Flagstaff on I-40? Flat desert.

Henry Mountains

The Colorado Plateau does have some other features. Mountains, tall, green, and wet, supplying water to the desert. Three ranges of mountains, the La Sals near Moab, the Abajos, known to locals as the Blues, and the Henry Mountains, near to nowhere. The La Sals are the tallest, over 12,000 feet. The Abajos and the Henrys stretch to 11,000 feet. They stand in contrast to the red rock country surrounding them, and provide a welcome relief. People go there in summer to cool off and enjoy the wildlife.

Geologically, the mountains are Laccoliths, formed by a neck of molten magma rising to a weaker junction between two layers of sandstone. At that junction the magma moves laterally, forming a mushroom shaped dome of igneous rock in the domain of sandstone. The overlying strata usually erode away, leaving the igneous core. The Henrys are the type location for Laccoliths, being the subjects of the earliest study, and displaying the domed shape.

Salt Creek Canyon

The three ranges are important to ranching, providing water, hay farming, and a summer range, with the stock wintering on the desert. Salt Creek, draining north from the Blues, has a canyon with year-round water, arches, and Ancestral Puebloan ruins and rock art. The canyon also provides access to a park in the midst of the Needles District of Canyonlands. I like that park because it was never grazed. It provides a look at the land before cattle came, trampling or eating everything, mangling stream banks, and bringing alien species like cheat grass. No I won’t tell you where it is. Go look for yourself.

Posted in Arches, Bookcliffs, Canyonlands National Park, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Environment, Geology, Green River, History, Memoirs, My Story, Southwestern Archaeology, Southwestern History, Stories, Utah, Western Colorado

The Bookcliffs and the River

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Bookcliffs

The Book Cliffs are the neglected stepchildren of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. That is somewhat ironic, because they stretch from Palisade and Mt. Garfield about 200 miles to Price, Utah. Rising about 1000 feet from the valley floor, they are the longest escarpment in the world. Above the Book Cliffs is a bench With the Roan Cliffs forming another escarpment Behind the cliffs is the Roan Plateau, rising to about 8000 feet in elevation. With the wide change in elevation and precipitation from eight inches annually to around thirty, there is wide diversity in plant and animal life. There are energy resources as well. Natural gas, tar sands, oil, coal, and that huge deposit of oil shale. The region is known as the Tavaputs Plateau.

The plateau is home to the Desolation Canyon Wilderness and due to the wide range in elevation and precipitation, a diverse range of plant and animal life. There are three reasons why the area is not very popular with visitors.

First, look south. Colorado National Monument, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Grand Canyon National Parks. There are the three mountain ranges and all that wondrous red rock carved into some of the best scenery on earth.

Next, accessibility. Douglas Pass is the only paved road in the vast area. The many dirt roads are accessible only as long as they are dry. Traditionally, the only people there were stockmen and the Utes on their reservation. In recent times there has been much energy-related activity that comes and goes.

The third reason? Shale. It is not only shale, there are layers of sandstone, even limestone. It’s all gray or shades of tan. Driving on the drab Mancos shale landscape of I-70, looking north you see drab cliffs. More of the same gray rock, just standing up. Roads built on that shale changes into some of the most slippery substances known after a rain or snow.. People are just not inspired to go there.

Growing up in Fruita, Colorado, I spent quite a bit of time in areas on either side of the Douglas Pass road, which was gravel and dust at the time. We had rancher friends, and deer season was a big social scene. It is wild, mostly empty country, home to lots of cattle, some sheep, a few ranchers, and a lot of wildlife. It is also famous for some of the most treacherous mud in the world. There are some sandstone lenses (we called them rims), but it is mostly shale, a former lake bottom that now sits thousands of feet above the Grand Valley, where the people live.

Colorado National Monument. Bookcliffs on the horizon

I used to look at the Colorado National Monument with its red rocks to the south. To the north were the relatively drab Bookcliffs with the whitish Roan Plateau above them. Why the difference? The Monument is famous, with lots of information about the Uncompaghre Uplift lifting the Uncompahgre Plateau thousands of feet compared to the Grand Valley. As the plateau, erosion took the more recent rocks off, leaving the more resistant sandstone.

I thought some sort of uplift must have formed the Bookcliffs. Well, partly. When the entire Colorado Plateau was uplifted at the same time as the Rockies, The Colorado River just dug away, carrying the eroded rock to the sea. It is still digging, and is eroding those Bookcliffs to the north. Under the Bookcliffs are the rocks of the Monument. Someday the land will be fairly flat between Grand Junction and Craig. We won’t be around, however. These things take time.

So, the Colorado Plateau was uplifted and after that the Uncompahgre Plateau went up some more and wore down. The rocks exposed at the Monument are, a few miles north, well below the rocks of the Bookcliffs who are headed north as the river gnaws away. The Colorado River rules, it is just a bit slow.

Posted in Bookcliffs, Colorado Plateau, Environment, Geology, Stories, Uncompahgre Uplift, Western Colorado

Colorado Rain, Ritual

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Bill Leave a comment

Rain for a month. In Colorado! The climate change deniers must be having second thoughts. It rains on the unrighteous (Republicans) as well as the righteous (me). The upside is that we have been finishing up our landscaping project which began with our new garage last summer. There are just a few loose ends, a little planting, support for the raspberry bushes, and cleaning up after the hailstorm.

Some of our new plants are a bit ragged, but I don’t think we lost anything. Our neighborhood does not seem to get quite the weather extremes as other areas in the metro area. We have a lot of leaves down I will rake up if it ever dries out. I had sense enough to put my pickup in the garage before Thursday’s hailstorm.

Climate change. It seems like this area will be wetter with more extreme events than in the recent geologic past. Our front range mountains are good at catching moisture brought in from both gulfs by a low pressure system south of here. Some call it the Albuquerque Low. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring much rain to California.

This area may become something of an oasis in a growing desert. What is clear is that we can no longer count on the status quo. Humanity has to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. Of course, the earth seems to have self-correcting systems that restore a balance. It takes a long time however, and may mean the extinction of the species responsible for disrupting things. Once again the adage is proven true: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

On a completely different subject, I am I the coffee shop right next to the Denver University campus and today is graduation day. There were all these people all dressed up at 8:00 in the morning. The woman across from me at the table flew in from L.A. Last night for her best friends graduation. These rituals were on the wane for lots of years. I did not even entertain the idea of add ending my graduation from CSU, but of course it was the sixties. The only important ritual was passing the doobie.

Preschool

Now ritual seems to be returning. The Masons and the American Legion are dying out, but preschoolers are wearing caps and gowns to graduate. Ritual brings us together, and we need more. I don’t know what will replace the obsolete organizations, but something will probably happen. People need one another, and have to come together to reaffirm that need. Which reminds me, my 55th High School reunion is in September

Posted in Environment, Floods, Hailstorm, My Story, Rain, Stories

Nuking Western Colorado

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Project Plowshare, a U.S. government program was created to develop peaceful uses for nuclear detonations. The program led to three trials in rural Western Colorado designed to release natural gas from tight geologic formations that contained large amounts of natural gas. The gas was there, but was difficult to recover because it would not readily flow to wells. Nuclear fracking, in other words.

The idea was to fracture large amounts of rock releasing the gas for use. Fracking was in use in that era, but the area fractured around a well hole was fairly small, limiting the amount of gas freed. This would remain the case until horizontal well drilling was developed, resulting in a boom in natural gas production.

The use of atomic explosions somewhat larger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima would fracture a large amount of rock, liberating huge amounts of gas. There were three experiments. All three were somewhat successful, yielding gas in recoverable amounts. Big surprise, the gas was radioactive and remains so. A study indicated that the level of radioactivity released in a California home, when blended with gas from other sources, would be well below the dose we receive from background radiation. People would have none of it. No one wanted radioactive natural gas coming into their home at any level.

Western Colorado, source of much of the uranium used in nuclear bombs, had three detonations in a doomed experiment. The most casual of examinations of the proposal to liberate gas from tight strata would raise the radioactivity question. It took millions of dollars to prove the obvious: radioactive natural gas.

Some shots were done at the Nevada test site to explore using bombs to excavate. Huge amounts of radionuclides were released, affecting generations of downwinders, especially in St. George, Utah. Our nuclear tragedy started in New Mexico with the first Trinity detonation that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It continues today, with all the radioactive spots around the planet and the people sickened and killed by fallout.

Most historians assert that President Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately saved lives. What they did do was trigger the nuclear arms race with its terrible consequences. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have shown that nuclear power is risky as well.

My first literary effort was a story I wrote while a student at Mesa College in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1966. Project Rulison was in the works, and my story depicted an even greater failure. The blast sent radioactive oil into a previously unknown aquifer that opened into the irrigation canals that provide water to Grand Valley farms. Radioactive oil in Palisade, Grand Junction, Fruita, and the rest of the valley, rendering it uninhabitable. Pure fiction, but a fun story.

Come up to today, and fracking is still controversial. I think the legacy of Project Rulison is stalking the oil and gas industry to this day. Somehow the industry did not get it that bad practices will catch up with them, despite the API’s slick commercials.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

Part Three, the Keystone XL Pipeline

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Bill 3 comments

Pipeline Construction

When I was growing up in Fruita, Colorado in the 1950’s, the El Paso Natural Gas Company built a 26″ natural gas pipeline from north to south through Western Colorado. In flat country, laying a pipe is fairly straightforward. To lay a pipeline, dig, lay pipe, weld, wrap, and backfill. In the Colorado Plateau, the pipeline not only goes from point to point, it goes up and down.

North of Fruita, The line had to go over Douglas Pass. As Colorado passes go, it is no big deal. Not that high, but near the top there is steep and unstable ground famous for landslides. The trenchers, welding machines, side-boom tractors handling pipe, and bulldozers; all had to be winched up and down the mountainside. That is a slow, expensive process. To us in Fruita, it meant that our little town had lots of pipeliners for several weeks.

I mostly saw the pipeliners in Hill’s Cafe, where we often had dinner. The stereotype is that pipeliners are a wild bunch, but we didn’t see it in the cafe. They were quiet, well-behaved, some prayed before eating, and I liked them. After all, if you are from Bald Knob, Arkansas, how wild can you be?

That pipeline brings gas from Wyoming, Western Colorado, and Eastern Utah to markets in Texas and the southwest, including California. To my knowledge, it has few problems and quietly does its job. I think that pipeline has shaped my thinking about pipelines in general.

Today there is much oil and gas development in North Dakota and Alberta. A pipeline network exists to deliver crude oil from there to the refinery complex on the Gulf Coast. It can’t deliver all that is being produced. Proposed is a new line, the Keystone XL Pipeline that would run west of the existing line, picking up crude from the Williston Basin in North Dakota as well as the synthetic crude from the Alberta tar sands.

There is a lot of opposition for several reasons. One reason is fear of leaks. Big spills, contamination, fire, ground water contamination, and all the risks that go with moving lots of nasty stuff that burns. That Alberta synthetic crude is even nastier than regular crude. Its carbon footprint is much higher than oil from traditional sources. It is thick and has to be heated to separate it from the sand. Most of the crude oil refined here in Denver is tar sand oil.

Oil Car Train

The fact is that as long as demand for petroleum products stays high, that Alberta crude will go south, but in rail cars if the pipeline isn’t built. Here in Denver, there are many tank car trains headed south, competing with coal trains for right of way. In the upper Midwest there is so much oil traffic that farmers are having difficulty shipping their grain. Pipelines are safer than rail cars for shipping petroleum.

Some of the opposition is for environmental reasons. Tar sand crude is bad. Pipelines are bad. Fossil fuel is bad. All true. The solution is not stopping pipelines, but reducing demand. How to reduce demand? Make fossil fuels more expensive with higher taxes. Use the tax money to develop alternative energy and transportation. Build rails not freeways. Tell that to Republican legislators.

In the meantime, I think the pipeline is the best alternative until our energy policies change.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Fear, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Pipelines, unjustified Fears

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