When a water line broke last month at the Grand Canyon, thousands of visitors had their lodging reservations abruptly canceled. The 12.5-mile pipeline supplies water from the canyon’s north side to its South Rim, where about 90 percent of the park’s 6 million annual visitors enter. The line has broken 85 times since 2010, forcing facilities to close, upending vacations and even causing restaurants to use paper and plastic because of lack of water to wash dishes.
Rather than replacing the line, the park has regularly done expensive repairs by helicopter, costing $25,000 a pop. But now the park is finally addressing the problem for good with a $208 million investment, partly thanks to recent landmark legislation devoted to fixing national parks.
In 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act to provide $1.3 billion a year for five years to fix long-neglected park maintenance projects such as the Grand Canyon water line. The act is helping reconstruct seawalls at the capital’s Tidal Basin, renew the iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road at Glacier National Park, improve utilities at Acadia National Park, make seismic reinforcements at Yosemite and support countless other repairs from sea to sea.
Despite the historic funding for repairs and improvements, park maintenance backlogs have continued to grow rather than shrink. Clearly, Congress and the park service under the incoming administration and likely Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum need a better approach.
