Who's to blame for our Great Salt Lake problem? And how can we fix it?

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

THE GREAT SALT LAKE IS DYING, harming global ecosystems, diminishing Utah's quality of life, and threatening human health. Toxic dust storms are now whipping up lakebed dust containing dangerous levels of cancer-causing arsenic and carrying it across the Wasatch Front.

Here's the kicker: there is plenty of water available in the lake's watershed to not only cover this toxic dust but to actually save the lake. But doing this requires letting river water flow into the lake without diverting it.

"We do have the water; we are just using it for other purposes," says Kevin Perry, the atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. His two-year research project first revealed that lower water levels have exposed a toxic lakebed with high concentrations of arsenic, which over time can lead to lung, bladder, and skin cancer as well as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The lake needs to be about 10 feet deeper to cover up most of the dust emission hot spots in Farmington Bay, which is the bay closest to residents along the Wasatch Front, Perry says. It would take about 7.5 million acre-feet of water to fill the lake to this level.

To just maintain the current water level, the Great Salt Lake would need 30 percent more inflow from the major rivers each year. But to stop the decline of the lake, it would take far more water than that additional 30 percent river flow, according to Perry.

The diminishing waters at the 1699-square-mile lake have been exacerbated by warmer temperatures, two decades of a mega-drought, and the worst two years of snowpack the state has ever seen. In recent years, river flows have been down 19 percent compared to the 20th-century average, according to Brad Udall, a Colorado State University climate and water scientist. A Utah State

University study suggests that the lake is 17 feet below its long-term average, and most of that loss--11 feet--is caused by humans.

So who's to blame for the Great Dust Lake?

Basically everyone.

"We live in the second driest state in the nation, but we treat water like it's a commodity that's always going to be there," Perry says.

According to the Utah Rivers Council, 85 percent of the Great Salt Lake's watershed is used for agriculture, 7.5 percent for industrial, and 7.5 percent for residential.

Utah's largest water rights holder is the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which has rights for more than 800,000 acre-feet in the Great Salt Lake Basin. (For comparison, an acre-foot of water is equivalent to water measuring one-foot deep spread across an acre.)

Those water rights are associated with large-scale federal projecfs that store water in reservoirs, such as Jordanelle, Willard Bay, and Deer Creek, which are managed by conservancy districts or water users associations for agriculture, municipal use, or industrial use. All told, tens of thousands of farmers, individual residences, large-scale agricultural operations, municipalities, and industrial operations divert as many as 2 million acre-feet of water upstream from Bear River, Weber River, and Utah Lake and Jordan River drainages, according to the Utah Division of Water Rights.

That's the equivalent of 651.7 billion gallons of water being pulled from the river before it hits the Great Salt Lake.

Meanwhile, the lake loses 2.9 million acre-feet of water to evaporation over the course of one summer, in addition to today's historic depletion. The lake levels will likely continue to decrease until fall or early winter, according to estimates by the US Geological Survey.

Over the past decade, Democrat and Republican lawmakers have proposed dozens of water conservation bills and proposed changes to water laws, but special interest groups that benefit from billion-dollar water pipeline or reservoir projects have either killed those bills or watered them down to be less effective. In fact, special interest groups contribute 82 percent of the campaign donations to state lawmakers.

As the lakebed continues to dry up, ecosystems around the globe hang in...