SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's powerful Speaker of the House is floating a new idea to help deal with dust blowing into communities from a shrinking Great Salt Lake.
"There’s several places across the Great Salt Lake that we can use the implementation of berms to back water up into the areas where there’s problems with dust," Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told FOX 13 News on Tuesday. "We let it sit for a while, then it crusts over and you can let the water back into the Great Salt Lake."
Speaker Schultz raised the idea during a briefing with the Great Salt Lake Commissioner before the Utah State Legislature's Executive Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. Brian Steed has been appointed by Utah's political leaders to come up with a plan to save the Great Salt Lake, which presents an ecological and economic catastrophe for the state should it keep shrinking.
Unfortunately, the winter snow and spring runoff did not deliver as much water to the Great Salt Lake as hoped. The south arm of the Great Salt Lake (where most of the population lives) is currently at 4,193.3 feet.
But it is not all bad news. Water is being dedicated to the lake and efforts are under way to get even more.
"Salinity, in really positive news, has really rebounded to where we need it to be," Steed told lawmakers on the committee.
Salinity helps keep the ecosystem moving. The Great Salt Lake provides an invaluable habitat for millions of migratory birds, helps fuel Utah's snowpack (which becomes our drinking water), and pumps billions into the economy. The lake has been declining primarily due to water diversions, impacts from drought and a changing climate.
The state has also changed tactics, managing the north arm and south arm of the lake as one. It's divided by a causeway with a berm. The north arm is known for its distinctive pink color.
As the lake shrinks, the lake bed is exposed. Winds then pick up the dust and it's blown into nearby communities. That's caused a lot of alarm for the public and politicians. The particles alone are bad enough for your health, but there are also naturally occurring minerals in the lake bed that would normally be covered in water. Some of them (like arsenic) can be toxic. Scientists are currently researching how much it will take to harm people's health.
To address that issue, Speaker Schultz referenced building berms. He articulated the idea in a brief interview Tuesday with FOX 13 News.
"We need to have all hands on deck, we need to be looking at all options," he said. "This is one of those options that we’ve been talking about. The water levels are significantly better in the Great Salt Lake than they have been in the past, but there’s still reason to be concerned."
Steed said if berms were to be built to help control dust, it would be a temporary fix. He said there is still more research that needs to be done before proceeding.
"In truth, we don’t know the full context of what that might do to the full lake. If you keep water on that freshwater side, we might end up starving that freshwater from the saltier side of the lake and we would hate to see those salinity levels spike because then we’d start to lose ecological integrity," he told FOX 13 News. "So we’re going to have to balance this out, but we’re happy to take a look at it and we’re happy to see all these different options of what might work best."
Environmental groups currently suing the state over its handling of the Great Salt Lake criticized the notion.
"The good thing is apparently our most powerful legislators are beginning to understand that allowing dust storms from the Great Salt Lake to smother the Wasatch Front will be devastating to our economy and a disaster for everyone’s health," said Dr. Brian Moench of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. "The bad thing is they are still groping for just about any solution, no matter how extreme, and avoiding the simplest, and most effective, which is to seriously address the massive diversion of the inlets to the lake. Without that, all these other ideas are absolutely going to fail."
Deeda Seed of the Center for Biological Diversity, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, was also critical.
"That is no solution to the crisis facing the Great Salt Lake and from a legal perspective, the state has an obligation to maintain the Great Salt Lake at its minimum healthy elevation and surface area, not to carve it up into smaller and smaller pieces," she said. "That would be a clear cut violation of the trust."
The litigation by environmental groups has frustrated lawmakers, who were critical of it during Tuesday's hearing. A judge recently rejected a request to dismiss the lawsuit against the state, which accuses them of violating the public trust doctrine, which means the lake is for the benefit of the people. (The judge also rejected the environmental groups' claim that the state is obligated to curtail water use.)
"I think the lawsuit is frivolous, I think the parties that are suing the state are extreme," said Rep. Casey Snider, R-Paradise, who sponsors a lot of legislation on water and the Great Salt Lake.
This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake—and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
