The plan to save Utah’s Great Salt Lake involves a big pipe
Out in Utah’s barren West Desert, past the hazardous-waste landfill and the military bombing range, on the far side of the Great Salt Lake, sits a silent, mysterious structure that will make a great ruin someday. Scratch that: it already is one. The three-story industrial building was hastily erected in the late 1980s, at a cost of $60 million, to house a pumping station with an urgent task: to suck water out of the Great Salt Lake and spew it into the desert flats farther west. The lake was then at record-high levels, threatening to flood railway lines, interstate highways, and farmland. The pumps were in operation for about two years before nature took over and the lake receded on its own. More than three decades later, the Great Salt Lake has the opposite problem—too little water.