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club position on water sale back to water sale main page December 8, 2001
ARE WE SELLING OKLAHOMA'S STREAMS DOWN THE RIVER?
by Chris Corbett, Chapter Chair
As most of you know by now, there is a proposal being
heavily promoted by Governor Keating, the Water Resources Board, the Chicksaw
and Choctaw tribes, and developers in North Texas to sell and pipe huge
quantities of water from Southeast Oklahoma rivers to the Dallas metroplex
area. The north Texans project their water needs will double within a few
decades, and they want Oklahoma's water to supply those needs.
Oklahoma promoters of the sale believe that once the water
spigot is turned on, millions of dollars will flow into the counties of
southeast Oklahoma for development projects. Looks like a win-win deal,
right? Well, not so fast.
The amount of water proposed to be sold to north Texas
would start at around 140 million gallons per day according to the Texans' own
proposal, and potentially increase to nearly 1 billion gallons per day after 6
or 7 decades. That's PER DAY folks. That's a helluva lot of water, even for
southeast Oklahoma. They would start by taking water from the Kiamichi River,
then from the Little and Mountain Fork Rivers, then from the Blue, Clear Boggy
and Muddy Boggy Rivers. Even the Glover River, the last free-flowing, undammed
river in Oklahoma, is on the list of rivers that may be tapped to fulfill the
notoriously wasteful Metroplex's unquenchable thirst for new water.
We've been asking the Water Resource's Board for their plan
of how all this water would be removed and delivered to Texas without creating
new dams or impoundments, and without adversely affecting the ecological
integrity on the rivers and the ecosystems that depend on them. After all, it
just stands to reason that when you remove huge amounts of water from a river,
it will affect the river. It can't help it can it? But it certainly might hurt
it! Where's the plan to implement this water sale without harming our rivers?
Where's the evidence that we can commit increasingly large amounts of water to
Texas over the decades without eventually creating en ecological disaster in
southeast Oklahoma?
Recently I, along with Doug Hawkins our vice-chair,
Jeannine Hale our conservation organizer, and Keith Smith, our legislative
lobbyist met with Duane Smith, Executive Director of the Water Resources Board
to ask him those questions. Duane Smith explained where the pipeline to
transport the water would be, he explained how the money would be distributed,
he even told us that no new impoundments would be created and that he
also didn't want the rivers or the rare or endangered species in them to be
harmed.
But again, we asked to see the plans for how and where the
water would actually be taken out of the rivers, how it could be done without
creating dams or impoundments, how the quantities for sale could be ratcheted
up without needing new dams or impoundments, where were the studies which
showed that all this could be done without harming the ecology of the rivers,
what happens when present reservoirs fill up with silt during the century -
will new ones need to be created just to satisfy Texas's needs, and what
impact will the eventual drying of the Great Plains due to global warming have
on the amount of water we have?
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, there have been
no environmental studies done which show how much water can be removed, or
when, without harming the ecology of our rivers, or how these enormous
quantities of water can be removed without necessitating the building of dams
or impoundments. There is NO PLAN that the Water Board could show us that said
"Here, this is what we're going to do" and "This is why it won't damage the
environment or require new dams".
We think it's a classic case of getting the cart before the
horse. Before Oklahoma even THINKS about selling water to Texas, and before we
create a new water compact commission to do so, high quality
environmental studies must be done to determine the effects of water removals
of this magnitude on the rivers of southeast Oklahoma. I encourage all
Oklahoma Sierrans to get involved in this issue in the coming months. It's a
sure bet that we will be asking you for letters and phone calls to your
legislators in support of preserving the ecology and integrity of
Oklahoma's southeastern rivers.
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