The Great Salt Lake has been shriveling up for decades. At its record low about four years ago, the ex-posed lake bed became a source of toxic dust, with scientists warning of imminent ecological collapse. A Utah official called the lake an “environmental nuclear bomb.”
But a monumental, perhaps impossible, plan to save it has gained significant traction in recent months. The goal: refill the Great Salt Lake in just eight years.
Once a niche cause for environmental advocacy groups, the task of replenishing the lake has won sup-port from many strange bedfellows. Republican state lawmakers in Utah have been working in close partnership with environmental organizations on restoration plans. Those efforts were already underway when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced last fall that the state would refill the Great Salt Lake by 2034, when Salt Lake City plans to host the Olympic Games. Josh Romney — son of former Sen. Mitt Romney — launched a $100 million philanthropic campaign in tandem with Cox’s announcement.
Last week, another unlikely ally joined the cause: “MAKE ‘THE LAKE’ GREAT AGAIN!” President Donald Trump, no friend of the Romney family, said on social media.
“Everybody’s on board,” said Tim Hawkes, a former Utah state representative who is the interim director of Romney’s fundraising project. “You’ve got the president of the United States tweeting about it. So that’s a lot of momentum.”
The undertaking, however, is immense and extremely expensive. Refilling the lake would require residents and business interests, from agriculture to mining, to use significantly less water so that more can flow into the lake and stay put. People are a primary reason for the Great Salt Lake’s decline: Its water has been overallocated, meaning users collectively have the right to more water than what flows into the lake each year.
Thus far, the pace of progress is nowhere near what’s needed to restore the lake by 2034.
To have even a coin-flip chance of reaching its target level by the planned Olympic Games, Utah would need to increase the lake’s water by the amount in 400,000 Olympic swimming pools every year for the next eight years.
(Yahoo News)
“It’s herculean,” said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, an advocacy group.
The water needed annually is double the quantity the state secured for it over the past five years, ac-cording to a January task force report.
“It is going to take a lot of money,” Romney told NBC News.
He said he has raised about 30% of his $100 million goal so far. Ultimately, he added, it could take $500 million to stabilize lake levels.
No terminal saline lake — the term for a lake in which water flows to a basin with no exit and accumu-lates salt and other minerals — has ever been fully restored. And right now, the region has a dismal snowpack, which could again drive the water level to near record lows in the fall.
Still, advocates hope the lofty goal drives desperate action. (Yahoo News)