Thank you. Good morning again, I'm here to give you a little bit of an update on the long-term experimental and management plan EIS.
Thats an acronym, it's also come to be a verb for those of us working on it, we LTEMP day in, and day out.
First I'll review for you, the process and scope of the EIS, the list of alternatives that we're considering actively
and of rough idea of the schedule that we're working on right now.
Why our we doing this new plan to refine the operation Glen Canyon Dam?
We're taking advantage of the 18 years of research that we have gained since the record of decision
through the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program,
and we're continuing to comply with ongoing requirements, principally Endangered Species Act and also the
National Historic Preservation Act to protect resources in compliance with the Grand Canyon Protection Act.
This is a jointly process for the environmental impact statement.
The Bureau of Reclamation operates the dam of course the National Park Service is the principle landowner within the area that could be affected
by how we operate the dam, the three park units from Glen Canyon down to Lake Mead.
We have Argonne National Laboratory under contract via interagency agreement to prepare the EIS, they are a contractor operated
but owned by the Department of Enegy, there operated by the University of Chicago.
We have 14 cooperating agencies
at least one of them is in this room, Don, with the Upper Colorado River Commission and the western folks are here to,
and six..., nearly half of the cooperators are tribes, five of them are active in the Addaptive Management Program.
So generally the scope of the document itself is that we are considering actions that could
change how we operate the Dam to further the purposes of the Grand Canyon Protection Act,
there also some non-flow actions under consideration
these include some pilot project ideas for vegetation management in the Grand Canyon and in Glen Canyon
and also trout control. The issue there being that trout tend to eat humpback chub and we have a biological opinion requirements
and of course a desire to maintain healthy populations of the four Colorado River endangered fish.
All of the alternatives comply with the 2007 interim guidelines,
so the annual volume of water and our delivery requirements do not change
within year, the alternatives are looking at changes in monthly volumes and changes in
flows, but we still have to meet that annual requirement.
The process is not considering any major infrastructure changes to Glen Canyon Dam, we're simply looking at
refining the releases from the dam to see if we can
protect , and where possible improve resources
as required by the Grand Canyon Protection Act.
The maximum operational releases therefore are 45,000 cubic feet per second,
and the alternatives all go up to that maximum most of them do, but you have a variety of
frequencies and durations in different constraints to see how we can
affect for the better, certain resources and not do harm to other resources.
There is variation among the alternatives on this fish management, some of them are trying trout management flows and some of them
involve mechanical removal. We're very much aware that some of the tribes are concerned about
the taking of life in the Grand Canyon,
and we're actively consulting with them on on this problem. Their well aware of what
these alternatives can contain and we're continuing discussions with them on that aspect.
Here are the alternatives that we carried forward for analysis
no action is continuation of the modified low fluctuating flows, pursuant to the 96 record of decision.
the ballanced resource alternative was proposed by the Colorado River Energy Distributers Association.
The Condition-Dependent Adaptive Strategy was proposed by the basin states,
and then the rest of those have been devised by Reclamation.
If we can turn to the next slide, the Hybrid Alternative is a new one and having looked at that those first six,
Reclamation looked across all the alternatives to see what good ideas we might bring together
and see if we can improve on those other action alternatives.
We are in active dialogue with cooperators and stakeholders to see if we can get some consensus on this
and it's still very much a moving target, we've briefed the cooperators and some of the other stakeholders and actually we met with Zuni
last week so we have started speaking with the tribes, and that will be an ongoing process.
This little table
shows you the characteristics as we know them today, this is still very much in analysis and in discussion as to how we move
forward on this but I it does show you up top the first 123-4567
different flow regimes that might be tried and then we have the trout management flows that are also under consideration
and then of course low summer flows, and the last one is not a flow scenario
that would be mechanical removal of trout, if we have a need to do that, again to fulfill our Endangered Species Act Requirements.
This is just a lot of boxes that shows you the modeling and just how very complex the inter relationships are among the resources that we're
dealing with in the Glen Canyon Dam operation.
Most of modeling is done, we're still working on the power modeling which we expect to be finished in early November,
but this gives you an idea of just how much work has been done to date and how we're
currently trying to assimilate and articulate the results of all this modeling.
Currently we are not sleeping much we're working on assembling the administrative draft
for our own internal review and then to share by early December with a cooperating agencies,
they asked for it for Christmas and we're happy to oblige
but, we are all working collectively and cooperatively very hard to try to get a draft done early in calendar year 2015.
That draft would be published for 60 day comment period
and that include
four or five public hearings.
And with that, we do have a website if you are interested in seeing how we're progressing,
this is the address on the web and you can certainly if you wish, signup up for mailing list to get updates
and with that will close with a shot of
the Grand Canyon.