[perils of water abstraction according to Smithsonian]We are referenced by the Smithsonian Ins\ titute's Ocean Planet exhibit, on NASA webspace! :-)

Dam-Reservoir Impact & Information Archive: DRIIA

Dam-Reservoir Info & Impact Archive

Established in April of 1994.

In memory of Terry Cottam and Adrian Weber.

The Web's *original* dam impacts site!

[perils of water abstraction according to Smithsonian]We are referenced by the Smithsonian Institute's Ocean Planet exhibit, on NASA webspace! :-)

These pages copyright C. Dianne Murray and the Dam-Reservoir Working Group as noted, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, except where other authors and dates are noted. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, but link to pages at will.

[Best Viewed With Any Browser] [Smithsonian's Ocean Planet Exhibit] [Political site of the day, Jan. 7th, 1999]> [Winner of Top Ten Award on tenlinks.com for civil engineering, under dams]

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Welcome!

... you've reached the web's *original* site on water development impacts : the Dam-Reservoir Information & Impact Archive!

We are updating. test Herein you'll find impact information on dams, water diversions, impoundments, and hydroelectric projects, and related links. While not exhaustive, we have plenty of info. Begun in 1994, this site is an ongoing project of the Dam-Reservoir Working Group.

Our mission?; to be THE antidote to the unbalanced, biased, and incomplete information provided by promoters and developers of water development. We're here to, ah, hand them a reality "cheque". ;) based on peer-reviewed literature, none of it contentious, and much of it now 20 or more years old, as well as on the breaking news reports concerning dam sites and projects around the world.

Raison d'etre

Why this archive? Primarily because the word you hear on the street is an incomplete one - that of promoters rather than researchers into impacts. It makes little sense to go to a promoter for the known downsides of a project. Yes, they know how to build and run reservoirs and power stations but that hardly makes them experts on the agricultural, hydrological, ecological, oceanographic (yes - reservoirs have effects on the deltas and estuaries!), seismic, environmental and socio-economic impacts.

If I want a dam built [not an EIA, mind, just one built] sure I'll go to one of the E-7 and not a biologist. But for a haircut, I say go to a barber, not a scissors manufacturer, or a butcher. For a side of beef, visit the butcher not the barber...'nuff said! ;)

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Global Effects

Real projects have real effects. And truth can be stranger than fiction! Dams in the Northern Hemisphere have even been shown by a NASA geophysicist to be speeding the earth's rate of rotation, as well as altering Earth's magnetic field.

Sure, sure, promoters - just *tell* me that's not a major effect! ;-)< Leading research shows that profligate damming and redirection of rivers is having some surprisingly ugly global effects. In 1997 there were ~39,000 large dams in the world, 5500 in the United States and 618 in Canada; is it any wonder global effects are happening?

[Planet Ark Environmental News Headline Service] Check out Planet Ark for news headlines from around the world concerning ecologically & environmentally relevant happenings. Energy, water and other relevant links for people interested in water abstraction, development and sustainable cleaner energy information.

What's new?

I am in the midst of updating this page. In order to defray costs which have always been donations in kind as well as out of my own pockets I have had to make the decision to place banner ads up to bring in some revenue. I cannot afford to do this out of my own pensioned pockets any longer. I hope you find the advertisers I have selected worthwhile. Please show your support by makewing purchases from them BUT NOTE NOT EVERY BANNER LINK is to an advertiser: the hunger site, Green power and the rainforest sites are not sites through which I receive any revenue. The WaterWeb Consortium has a site on Water & the Environment.

IONICS 2-Day INTERNATIONAL WATER SYMPOSIUM. KeyWATER Web Portal is based out of Belgium, with links to lots of other water sites, including the WaterMasters Ring with links to post-graduate courses and opportunities and information.

Chinese farmers protesting embezzling amongst government workers on the Three Gorges Project are being held by the government of China.

Scientific American has several online articles concerning water resources and conservation:

In Growing More Food with Less Water, by Sandra Postel the author argues that severe water scarcity presents the single biggest threat to future food production and urges that low-cost irrigation devices, high-efficiency systems, and environmentally sound technologies be produced, distributed, and used.

In How We Can Do It, by Diane Martindale and Peter H. Gleick the authors present four short essays on possible solutions to some of the world's water problems, including desalination, transporting freshwater in enormous bags towed through the oceans, fixing leaks, and recycling wastewater for other uses.

Making Every Drop Count, by Peter H. Gleick is, I beleive the lead article. Check it out! Waste not, want not as some of our grand parents and great grandparents used to say! And if not? Well it only takes 3 days to dehydrate to death, folks.

Tenlinks.com has a top ten listing for dam pages on the world wide web under the civil engneering category. Click the above link to see their page with hot links to sites such as the US Bureau of Reclamation [who brought us the world's first giant dam - the Hoover dam],as well as the World Commission on Dams, plus other sites including ICOLD's US site and a dam site run by the US based Environmental Defense Fund with a funky site online map of dams around the world. These are just a few of the sites you can reach on dams throough tenlinks.com.

Friends of Sebago Lake now have a website up.Roger Wheeler of FOSL says to check it out for information on decommisioning, restoration and salmon.

Got graphics capability? Check out this BBC page. As they point out and ecologists and hydrologists have known for some time, our world's is running out of fresh water; 1 in 5 people (20%!) have no access to safe drinking water. BBC page on world water crisis. Heavy graphics.

California fisheries and rivers need protection Check this link out for what to do to help conserve food, habitat and jobs under threat from too much water withdrawal.

  • Stream and River Ecology
  • NASA's Global Change directory on aquatic habitat changes.
  • new energy links from Greenpower.
  • under construction: more biblio page links!

    • DRIIA pages

    GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING

    IMPACTS, ETC.

    More Links

    QUEBEC'S BILL 116 performs weird legal surgery on Canadian province's energy regulatory body

    The National Assembly, Quebec's provincial legislature, has passed a bill that is bound to have some nasty repercussions in terms of environmental protection. The Regie has not been dissolved as was e rroneously reported in the last update. It still has jurisdiction over the transmission and distribution of electricity and of natural gas. But it no longer has any jurisdiction over electricity generation. In other words the NA has attempted to make it impossible for Hydro-Quebec to be answerable to anyone but themselves and the Quebec government ion terms of what impacts generating electricity will have.

    How convienient for them, given the trouble they've had with scientists, aboriginal groups and others who opposed overdevelopment of the provinces runoff and water resources. The legislative act that did this is called Bill 116.

    files on Bill 116 passed by the Quebec Provincial Legislature

    There may be some trouble with readbility of these files. webmistress and sysadmin are STILL working to fix these problems.

    Information Supressed

    So do developers and promoters present a balanced picture of scientifically known impacts? The answer is: not so far as anyone here has seen. We'd like to have LINKS TO DEVELOPERS PAGES in the not too distant future. But hey... ;) so long as this remains an unfunded site and the developers have all that money, the onus should be on them to reciprocate with links, FIRST. But they don't want you to know what the impacts are and that there are alternatives so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. In any event it's more than a tad hypocritical to expect a shoestring budget place to do what the overpaid promoters won't. Should there be there be any scientists and/or philanthropists who would like to fund an upgrade to this effect please do contact the webmistress.

    REALITY: STRANGER THAN FICTION OR AT LEAST AS STRANGE! :-)

    Scientists trying to get information on this out to the public have been frequently supressed in a variety of countries leading some of them to dub {{promoters and pro-"as many dams as possible" decision makers}} as *ahem* "WATER BUFFALOES".

    Yes - it sounds strange but in point of fact, aquatic scientists have spoken out about being suppressed.

    Volume 41 of Canadian Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

    Perhaps the pentultimate example of this happened roughly 30 years ago in one of Canada's provinces, Manitoba. Despite being warned by a panel of experts not to build reservoirs, nor divert any waters from the Nelson-Churchill river system.. or if they must build.. to just sink turbines into the water, Manitoba Hydro went right ahead. And built what is now one of the world's best studied ecological disasters.

    I first encountered this information about 10 years ago when a scientist in the federal government pointed our group to an entire volume of a well-respected journal, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Volume 41. It tells in exquisite and horrible, easy to read *scientifically peer-reviewed* [!] detail exactly what happened in just one small fraction of the area of the project. Volume 41, published in 1984, looks at Southern Indian Lake, MB... and the impacts of the results of Manitoba Hydro's negligence in not heeding the words of the expert panel of impacts scientists.

    30 years later the Manitoba Cree have broken their silence: The Pimicikamak Cree Nation site is hosted by someone at St Cloud U in Minnesota. MB Hydro has once again decided to build some more dams, divert some more water, and, whether intentional or not, the effects Are known: it will be to kill more fish. And create more negative impacts on the health and socio-economic structure of the Cree people.

    These effects of too much water abstraction, diversion, "development", call it what you will, are WELL documented... over 30 years of peer-reviewed impacts studies show that there is no such a thing as truely clean water "development". Ther are natural limits to how many of these things you can safely build before spaking a cascade effect which is destroying more and more aquatic habitat. And just plain habitat.

    It would appear that the government of India dreams, [no doubt, in technicolour] that peer-reviewed impacts literature counts as "propaganda". They foolishly intend to fly in the face of 30 odd years of impacts literature and the laws of physics, never mind compassion for the people their projects will oust, and intend to take their, uh, case to the International Court in the Hague, despite no scientific legs for it to stand upon.

    It would seem that many many politicians and engineers are a little behind the eight ball, believing they can successfully fly in the face of natural systems limits, against the laws of nature and everything the impacts systems scientists have proved. Does it matter to them that their decisions effect people's lives? If *they* were the ones being relocated to non-arable land how would *they* feel? A bit different I suspect.

    Well, we have news for these seemingly hardheaded, shortsighted folks who control the fate of the world via their policies and lack of information. There are HARD limits to how much water flow can be diverted and changed before the whole ecosystem crashes via a domino effect. The developers are playing a truly costly game of chicken with the biosphere. Who do you suppose is outgunned here? The biosphere? My money is on those lawyers and policitians and many hydroelectric engineers and promotors silly enough to ignore systems science research results.

    The negative effects are neither contentious within their subdisciplines nor the result of any lack of testing nor are they wild imaginings. They are REAL, though no court may have heard of them.

    Do we want to make the same mistakes over and over again till we have no phytoplankton to produce oxygen? Till every fish is farmed? Till millions of hectares of arable land are submerged? They aren't making arable land anymore; arable land has a habit of being along the shores of rivers. The Narmada and Three Gorges and other river valley hydroelectric projects are in "food basket" areas. Why flood the the Yangtze and Narmada and Ganges breadbaskets of China and India? Promoterrs are courting disaster by thinking they can get around hard natural limits. [donate free food to the\ UN's World Food Program @ The Hunger Site]

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    BIG BLUE (and green) PLANET

    It is a huge misunderstanding by we humans - air-breathers that we are to think that the 3/4's or more of our planet's surface doesn't count for anything just because it's underwater and we can't see it. By way of an analogy, you can't =see= carbon monoxide or oxyegen, nor smell them, but I guarantee you they DO exist.

    And even though they are out of the immediate detection range of our limited sensory data, to ignore them and their importance is to ask for BIG TROUBLE.

    And so it is with the hydrosphere and hydrological cycle.

    Does it have to be this way? ... heavens, no! there are ways around these things. But that takes spine and the courage and the vision to change. Will the promoters lead the way to change?? I wouldn't bet on it; so it falls on the politcians, though public pressure, to push for change based on the real scientifically proven effects of too much water abstraction/development, call it what you will.

    REALLY WISE USE NEEDED

    Is that a dare? Absolutely! ;-> It's time to change; time to use our resources wisely... rather than blunder along blindly just because it's "always been done this way". We have the technology .. now if only we would just give a damn about our own true interests [like food & oxygen] instead of building too many dams, reservoirs and diversions and lining developers wallets.

    -Dianne Murray, Earth Day, April 22nd, 2000.

    and revised by her on October 11th, 2000

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    IT IS BROKE, SO FIX IT: WAYS AND MEANS

    WARNING! under construction! :-) Ideas for inclusions? email me!
  • Email the webmistress

    Demand Side Management

    New York State's Department of Environmental Protection recommends reducing water demand.

    What one deregulated company is doing to show how much water and energy you are using: Volt Viewtech's audits and Free water efficiency surveys, etc.

    DESALINIZE!

    US gov't gives the lowdown on DESALINISATION. Tampa Bay desalinization project.

    GREEN your power sources with the GREEN POWER discussion groups[GREEN POWER BUTTON]

    About DRWG

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    MAYBE WE NEED A MIRACLE TO SAVE OUR HOME PLANET'S WATER RESOURCES

    Can it hurt to pray for wise use of water "development" technologies? To pray that the planet and its people and all the aquatic creatures have enough clean water and air and arable land or whatever other resources they need? How could it? Hey... we may need a miracle to get through the Water Crisis! ;-> I am NOT joking! Try it: think of it as an experiment...

    These are the only two online powerful "shrines" I know of - one at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one in Perryville, Missouri.

    You do NOT need to be Catholic, or Christian or Jewish to place a prayer petition or a note in the Western Wall. You just need to believe.

    You may also light a candle at Journey to the One's Virtual Candle click on virtual candle and select the colour you want. Please place your prayers for our water and fish and aquatic resources and oceans and arable land etc etc online at: The Association of the Miraculous Medal and or at The Western Wall in Jerusalem, in Israel, otherwise known as the Wailing Wall. Peace. May the Great Spirit bless you.:)

    [Proud to be part of the OX project] boycott spam!Spam: just say no.

    Acknowledgements

    Support to keep DRIIA in operation through donations in kind to DRIIA through the generosity of: SSW logo dasA Coldstream software engineering logo (Last handcoded update: October 16th, 2000, by cdm. Copyright C. Dianne Murray, 2003 2001, 2000, 1999. 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994; and other authors and dates as listed and appropriate. All rights reserved. For information or permissions concerning republication contact the publisher.

    html writer's guild logoDianne Murray is a member of the HTML Writer's Guild.

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    last handcoded update, May 30, 2003, by cdm last handcoded update Apr. 24, 2001, by cdm.