By Michael Booth | The Colorado Sun
When a city must find its water 50 miles away and 1,400 feet underground, in an aquifer whose origins first had to be pegged to the late Cretaceous and the early Paleogene periods, and further delineated between Colorado turf on the surface or Wyoming land just a skosh to the north, while drilling two-way wells at $1 million each on the way to an eventual price tag approaching $400 million, and then filter out dissolved uranium, it would seem a stretch to call this plan the easy way out.
But for Greeley, bent on doubling its current population of 109,000 by 2060, this is indeed the simpler choice.
Greeley will store and retrieve its biggest future water supply at Terry Ranch, at the Wyoming border, because it’s the most convenient way to create a new bucket in a state where just getting the permit for building a dam takes more than 20 years.