NEWS

10 Arizona moments on the environment

Shaun McKinnon
The Republic | azcentral.com
Hikers get a better view of Grand Canyon National Park from Powell Point April 29, 2015.

As part of The Republic's 125th anniversary, we look back at some of the best moments in Arizona's history.

Here is a look at environment.

Grand Canyon becomes a treasure

By the latter half of the 19th century, the mountains and plateaus around the Grand Canyon had lured ranchers, miners, loggers and land developers. With the arrival of the railroad, tourist operators moved in, building trails and lodges to accommodate growing numbers of visitors.

In Washington, D.C., Indiana Sen. Benjamin Harrison tried three times to protect the canyon as a public park, but his efforts went nowhere until he became president. On Feb. 20, 1893, he established the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve, a designation that still allowed development.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the canyon and, in a speech afterward, delivered his famous admonition to, "Leave it as it is. Man cannot improve on it; not a bit. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it." In 1908, Roosevelt created Grand Canyon National Monument and on Feb. 26, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation making the canyon a national park, Arizona's first.

The state is now home to three national parks (Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest and Saguaro), 14 national monuments, two national recreation areas and seven sites protected as historical sites, memorials or trails.

Roosevelt Dam waters a desert

The miners and farmers who started to build Phoenix in the late 1800s found a source of water, the Salt River, but needed a way to move it — and to store it if possible, to provide water supplies during a drought.

A system of canals, not unlike those built by the Hohokams hundreds of years before, solved the delivery problem, but harnessing the Salt required something bigger. Around the turn of the century, a group of farmers and business leaders decided to build a dam and a reservoir to store and manage water.

In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt, by then a former president, dedicated Roosevelt Dam not far from the confluence of the Salt River and Tonto Creek. A water users association, known today as Salt River Project, took over management of the dam and the canals and, over the next 35 years, built three more dams on the Salt River and two on the Verde River.

The water was used primarily on farms at first, but today serves mostly homes and businesses. Without Roosevelt Dam, historians agree, Phoenix would never have grown into a major metropolitan area.

Aerial view of  Theodore Roosevelt Dam.

Colorado River compact divides the water

In 1922, leaders from seven states along the Colorado River and its major tributaries signed an agreement to divide the flow of water among themselves and establish rules about how the river would be managed.

None of the states was entirely happy with the deal, but Arizona took its opposition the furthest, refusing to ratify the agreement over differences in how the water was allocated. Still, as a result of the compact, the states and the federal government moved ahead with the first major storage project on the river, Hoover Dam, which created the largest man-made reservoir in the United States.

Arizona feared California would claim more than its share and, with work scheduled to start on another dam at Parker to divert water west, Arizona Gov. Benjamin Mouer sent the National Guard to the state's border to try to block construction. The dam was built and the river developed as lawyers and judges sorted out disputes, including the decades-long case Arizona vs. California.

In 1944, Arizona finally ratified the compact and over the next 20 years, reached agreements that secured its share of the river and water delivery infrastructure.

Uranium mining leaves a mark

In the years after World War II, with the encouragement of a federal government trying to build its nuclear stockpile, uranium mining companies began tapping into the rich deposits found in northern Arizona.

During the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, workers extracted uranium from hundreds of mines on and around the Navajo Reservation. As the demand for uranium slowed, mining companies abandoned their operations, leaving behind poisoned land, polluted groundwater and workers who grew ill and died at alarming rates.

In 1990 and again in 2000, Congress agreed to compensate some victims of the mines and the waste and in 1994, the Environmental Protection Agency started work on a clean-up plan, targeting abandoned uranium mills and polluted ground and water.

Glen Canyon Dam fills a treasure

After construction of Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border, the federal government and the seven states that had divided the Colorado River decided the system needed more storage. A plan emerged to build another large dam on the Arizona-Utah border in Glen Canyon.

The dam was completed in 1963 and created a reservoir, Lake Powell, that helps protect the states up-river in a drought. Water managers say without the dam, the states would have been forced to restrict water use during the ongoing Western drought.

Environmental groups fought the dam from the start, insisting it would destroy unique wilderness areas and further exploit natural resources. But the environmental effects reached downstream as well, changing the river's ecosystem as it flowed through the Grand Canyon.

Central Arizona Project opens up the future

The Central Arizona Project (CAP) Canal, October 1, 2014, near Picacho Peak.

With the Colorado River Compact, Arizona secured 2.8 million acre-feet of water, but the state had no way of delivering that water to Phoenix and Tucson, where the population was growing fastest.

Congress approved the Central Arizona Project in 1968. Plans called for a 336-mile canal from Lake Havasu on the lower Colorado through Phoenix and to Tucson. It would deliver 1.5 million acre-feet a year of water to Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties. A coal-fired power plant near Page would provide the electricity required to pump the water across the uneven desert terrain.

Construction began in 1973, and in 1985, the first water from the river spilled into a field of crops on the western edge of Maricopa County, in the Harquahala Valley. Eight years later, the canal reached Tucson.

Water from the canal has been used to water crops, supply cities and, as a hedge against future drought (and insurance that California won't try again to claim more than its share), unused water is stored in underground aquifers.

Groundwater Management Act changes drilling

As Phoenix developed the Salt and Verde rivers as water sources for a growing population, most of Arizona — and large areas around Phoenix as well — relied on groundwater.

By the 1970s, cities, farmers and mining operations were pumping more water than rain and runoff could replenish. In some areas, users pumped twice as much water as was replenished. At the same time, cities and businesses clashed over the traditional system of groundwater management, one based on land ownership.

Finally, the state's government and business leaders decided Arizona needed a comprehensive groundwater management act. Negotiations were rocky. Competing interests refused to budge. Finally, Gov. Bruce Babbitt persuaded the federal government to issue an ultimatum to Arizona: Adopt the groundwater laws or the feds wouldn't sign off on the Central Arizona Project.

In 1980, the Legislature adopted some of the most sweeping groundwater laws in the nation. In the urban areas, new growth could not rely on groundwater. Cities and developers had to prove they could supply 100 years of renewable surface water for new subdivisions. Goals were set to balance groundwater pumping and replenishment. Conservation guidelines were adopted. And the CAP was built.

Megafires ravage the forests

A smoke column from the Rodeo Fire towers over ranch homes in the Pinedale area as the fire approaches  Thursday.

On June 18, 2002, a part-time firefighter trying to create work set a fire near Cibecue on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation of eastern Arizona. Two days later, about 20 miles away, a stranded hiker started a signal fire trying to catch the attention of a news helicopter. The Rodeo and Chediski blazes fed hungrily on the dry, dense ponderosa forests, merged three days later and raged for nearly a month as the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, at 468,638 acres the largest wildfire in Arizona history.

Drought and overgrown forests fueled that fire and a decade of wildfires that charred more than 3.5 million acres of wildlands across Arizona. The damage was unprecedented. Fires burned tens of thousands of acres at a time. Five fires in 10 years exceeded 100,000 acres. By the end of 2011, nine of the state's 10 worst fires had occurred since 2002.

By 2011, the drought had turned the forests and wildlands into tinderboxes. Two big fires swept through Arizona that year: The Horeseshoe 2, which burned across 222,954 acres in southern Arizona, and the Wallow, which burned 538,049 acres in eastern Arizona and became the state's worst wildfire on record. By the end of 2011, fire had charred over 1 million acres.

Dry conditions continued to challenge wildland fire managers. In 2013, the Yarnell Hill Fire killed 19 hotshot firefighters, making it the deadliest fire in Arizona history.

Trout and wolves return, slowly

The Apache trout is one of just two trout species native to Arizona and was once found through more than 800 miles of streams and rivers in the state's high country. But the introduction of non-native fish and the loss of habitat to land development drove the trout nearly to extinction.

In 1969, the Apache trout became one of the first species listed under the new federal Endangered Species Act. In Arizona, federal and state officials worked with the White Mountain Apache Tribe on a plan to preserve the trout and increase its numbers again. The program was successful and, in 2002, the trout was taken off the endangered species list and is now considered threatened.

The Mexican gray wolf all but vanished from Arizona's wildlands decades ago, driven to near-extinction by the loss of habitat and an eradication program intended to remove the wolf as a threat to livestock. In 1998, as part of a wolf recovery project, 11 wolves were released into a designated habitat straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border.

The program was controversial from the start. Ranchers feared they would lose livestock to the wolves and fought the introduction of new animals. Environmental groups accused the ranchers of killing wolves and there have been arrests. State wildlife managers disagreed with federal managers frequently.

Today, there are about 109 Mexican gray wolves in the wild, a number that has grown in recent years but one that conservation groups say won't sustain the species over time.

Native Americans claim water rights

On Nov. 18, 2004, Congress gave final approval to the largest Indian water rights settlement in U.S. history, an agreement that could make several Arizona tribes powerful water brokers in the future.

Under the settlement, tribes now control more than 650,000 acre-feet of water, nearly half the flow of the Central Arizona Project Canal. That much water could serve an urban population of almost 3 million people.

The settlement grew out of a 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave Indian tribes the rights to water needed for their reservation. Over the years, Arizona tribes filed claims that, if awarded outright, would have left little water for non-tribal users. In response, state officials and water providers agreed to negotiate a settlement that would avoid a long court battle and provide Arizona with long-term certainty about its water supplies.

The Gila River Indian Community was the greatest beneficiary. The community has since started building a network of canals and water infrastructure to help restore some of its historic agricultural areas. The community has also agreed to lease some of the water to urban users.

Negotiations with the state's largest tribe, the Navajo Nation, have stalled repeatedly with no final settlement in sight.

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