What took place at the Grand Canyon over the weekend was especially cruel. Flash floods happen here all the time, so it wasn’t the flooding itself that was strange. A $200 million project was well under way to finally fix the canyon’s old water pipeline that keeps breaking. It had been planned by engineers for more than ten years. The money had been arranged. The work began in 2023. Then, over one weekend in late August, floodwaters ripped through Bright Angel Canyon and dammed up about 40% of the Transcanyon Waterline, according to the park.
Millions of people visit the Grand Canyon every year, but the 12.5-mile pipeline is the only way for them to get water. It moves water from one edge of the canyon to the bottom, across a bridge, and back up the other side. The route goes through such rough terrain that even small repairs are often done by helicopter. The building was done in the 1970s. Since 2010, it’s broken more than 85 times. Now, Grand Canyon Deputy Superintendent Brian Drapeaux is saying out loud what everyone knew but didn’t want to: “We expect miles of the pipeline to be destroyed.”
And the fact that this has almost certainly happened before makes it even harder to deal with. In the 1960s, just as the first pipeline was about to be finished, heavy rains flooded the inner canyon and destroyed 40% of the work. The same number. After sixty years, the canyon, the percentage, and the storm were all the same. That makes it hard not to think of something else.
The floods killed at least two people. As of Monday nite, one person was still missing. Over the weekend, about 80 people were saved. Overnight stays are no longer allowed in the park, and people are being asked to take shorter showers, turn off the water while they brush their teeth, and only flush certain toilets. These aren’t big gestures; the South Rim actually doesn’t have a lot of stored water, and park officials need to make the most of what they do have by sharing it between law enforcement, rescue operations, a medical clinic, a campground, and basic park management. Tom Martin, a river runner who has run through the canyon many times, said that tanker trucks have been used in the past to bring water into the park. That could become the plan again, at least for a while.
The Grand Canyon worked on the pipeline upgrade project for more than ten years before it started building. This was supposed to solve the problem for good. It required replacing several miles of pipe, setting up landing pads for helicopters to make future repairs less of a mess, building new water treatment plants, and moving the water intake down the canyon to be closer to Phantom Ranch. A study from 2018 even found that important infrastructure for taking in water would be located outside of areas that are likely to flood. After this weekend, that assessment brings up questions that no one seems ready to answer yet.
Everything is made more difficult by the landscape, even the materials that were chosen for the project. Aluminum was used for the first pipeline. It was lighter and easier to carry into a steep canyon, but it was more likely to break. The upgrade engineers chose flex-steel as a material because they thought it would be a good balance between weight and durability. It takes years to figure out things like that. Still, it’s not clear how much of the new work was damaged by the flooding and how much will need to be redone.
All of this makes it seem like the Grand Canyon’s water problem has never really been fixed, just put on hold. After a pipeline broke ten years ago, a fancy hotel on the edge of the canyon had to stop washing dishes properly and use paper plates instead. This is the kind of place that is proud to list the presidents who have eaten there. In 1995, it took almost a month to fix things, and water had to be brought in by truck the whole time. Before this flood, the park already had ways to save water in place. The project to improve it has been said for a long time that it will meet the park’s water needs for at least fifty years. It’s really not clear if that timeline still applies after what happened over the weekend.
The National Park Service said that more flooding was likely to happen on Monday. At the earliest, a full damage report wouldn’t be finished until Tuesday. Parts of the park are still closed for now, rescue efforts are still going on, and no one knows what will happen next. The canyon is making everyone around it wait, which is something it does.
