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As the stories proliferate about Islamic terrorists crossing the Mexican border with nuclear devices, I've thought about where someone might go to create the most damage with a nuclear weapon yet minimize the fallout. And the most likely scenario is Glen Canyon Dam, which sits on a remote stretch of the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon.
Destruction of this dam would release the waters of Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made lakes on the planet (it stretches better than 180 miles behind the dam and reaches into countless coves and canyons). That much water, sweeping through the Grand Canyon all at once, would change the look of the canyon forever. It would also scour out millions of tons of rock and debris and send it cascading down river toward Lake Mead.
There would be so much rock and mud and devastated dam mixed with the flooding water, it would enter and sweep through Lake Mead as a solid, turgid mass. As big as Lake Mead is, it would pose little obstacle to this raging wall of solid water, which would barrel through the lake and hit Hoover Dam with a force far greater than the blast that destroyed Glen Canyon Dam.
Mixed with the rock and mud, and propelled by the added force of the released waters from Lake Mead, the broken chunks of Hoover Dam would be born down the river in a torrent of unimaginable fury, on a certain path to destroy the dams below -- Alamo, Parker, Painted Rock.
The destruction would be boundless, the impact unimaginable. With little loss of life (compared to a blast in an urban area), and minimal impact from fallout (though the waters would spread it far and wide), such a scenario would rob the West of as much as half of its water and a large percentage of its power generating capacity. It would take years to rebuild it -- if we even could, or would want to try. The cities of South California, Arizona and Nevada would empty soon, newly-created ghost towns of the West, the citizens dispersed in a frantic effort to find water and shelter from the spreading toxic waste.
With water for irrigation gone, millions of acres of farmland would become unproductive. Without the power from the dams' turbines, those who remained in the West would need to turn to other forms of power generation: coal and nuclear, with all their attendant problems and concerns. The impact would be global, both for the loss of the farmland and the foreboding sense of insecurity that would attach to all the world's dams -- and there are hundreds of thousands of them.
We can only hope adequate measures are being taken to avoid this scenario. From what I've heard and read, I suspect there's been little done to protect us from such an attack. And how could there be? Glen Canyon is but one of over 50,000 "major dams" in the United States. All told, there are more than a quarter million dams in the States, of all shapes, compositions, and sizes. How do we protect against everything that can happen and still remain a free people? That will be the question our grandchildren's grandchildren will continue to debate.
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