Wanderlust World Wanderlust World More than 3 million visitors come each year to Arizona's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which includes Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam, but it remains one of the Bureau of Reclamation's most controversial projects. Dam building in the United States became an important national policy in 1902 with the creation of the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation Agency, mandated to reclaim desert and arid lands in 17 western states. This aim coincided with a growing need for electrical power, and culminated in the agency's huge Grand Coulee Dam in 1933. Hydroelectric power today accounts for a little less than half the nation's energy production.
Federal Bureau of Reclamation engineers and geologists began planning the Glen Canyon Dam in 1946 after determining that the canyon walls were high enough and strong enough to withstand the pressure of 27 million acre feet of water.
According to a Bureau of Reclamation history of the dam, construction officially began in 1956, but construction crews spent nearly three years preparing the site, which included building the Glen Canyon Bridge needed to bring construction equipment, workers and materials to the remote Arizona desert location.
According to the Bureau, building the 710-foot tall concrete structure took another three years. Workers then began installing the huge turbines and generators needed to generate over a million kilowatts of electricity. This took three years more. "Ladybird" Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson's wife, dedicated the dam on Sept. 22, 1966, 20 years after the beginning of the project.
The dam provoked argument from its inception. In 1963, before the dam's completion, the Sierra Club's David Brower argued against it and claimed it served no purpose not already served by the Hoover, Parker and Davis dams. Environmentalists today claim that it wastes hundreds of thousands of feet of water and serves mainly to provide subsidized waters to industrial farming "trying to make unfarmable land farmable." Some critics question the continued viability of the Colorado River itself in another 50 years. Glen Canyon Institute's Richard Ingebretsen told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2007: "The dam will be there or it won't be there. But with the overuse of the water and global warming, Lake Powell won't be here."
The dam's defenders claim that the loss of hydropower-generating capacity would be offset by electricity generated from fossil fuel, that the present users of the Colorado River Storage Project's electricity would suffer significant rate increases, and that is contrary to environmentalists' claims the dam poses no threat to public safety. They also point out that each year 3 million visitors come to Lake Powell, which the dam has created, and stay longer than in any other federal park.