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Show caught in the act For a couple of years it's been quite obvious that the matter of flooding Lake Powell to levels projected when the dam was built, would become one of the most controversial issues raised during this decade between developers and conservationists in Southern Utah. The reason the question has been obvious, is that Congress authorized construction of the Glen Canyon Dam with full knowledge that at maximum height, the watercourse under Rainbow Bridge would be flooded with lake waters, and that existing sec- tions of U. S. law prohibited the encroachment of reclamation reservoir waters over national park or monument boundaries. We find it difficult to believe that the Congressional Congres-sional action back then simply made a mistake and overlooked an obscure law. The fact that protective dams were considered for Bridge Canyon and later abandoned convinces us that congressional delegates were aware of the conflict in the law. and simply decided to cross that bridge (or flood that bridge) when they came to it a number of years down the road. Well, with record runoffs coming out of the mountains, that day has arrived. Federal Judge Willis Ritter did the only proper thing, in our opinion, in ruling in favor of statutory law and ordering the level to be kept static without increasing during spring runoff season. We personally would not like to see Bridge Canyon flooded, and feel that Congress should have made adequate provision for that possibility when they passed the legislation which ultimately resulted re-sulted in the spending of over $760 million on the Glen Canyon storage project. It the court order is allowed to tand. losses in power generating revenue will be sustained in Utah, as well as allocations of water from a never-sufficient never-sufficient Colorado River. That is. to say the least, unfortunate. We cannot Jielp. however, lending our support to the judiciary on this one. The courts have caught the Congress in a deliberate "oversight." |