From the Nile to the Blue River in Silverthorne

DILLON — Being from Egypt, Hesham Ghany wasn’t used to the cold of a Summit County autumn as he learned about the Colorado water system Saturday at Dillon Amphitheatre.

Despite the chill, Ghany, among 25 other high-ranking water officials from nine African nations, listened to local Water Commissioner Scott Hummer talk about the Blue River Basin and its importance to the Colorado water system.

Throughout the week, officials from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda studied the Colorado water system and its compacts with varying states.

The officials are part of the Nile Basin Initiative, a group hoping to achieve sustainability in the Nile River basin. The driving force for the group’s visit is to achieve socio-economic development through equal utilization of the basin in the future, Ghany said.

“This group came here as part of the focus on the capacity of enabling the use of the Nile River basin,” said Ghany, who is the Initiative’s regional project manager. “We found this is an opportunity to focus on the support system we would like to have ... This is what we are doing and debating, so we want to see the experience here and how they manage this support system (in Colorado).”

The group took a trip to the Dillon and Green Mountain reservoirs Saturday and listened to Hummer discuss the system and the Blue River Basin’s role.

Hummer gave an outline on how the Western Slope sustains itself with generally less than 16 inches of precipitation a year — a similar climate to the deserts of Africa.

“Colorado on an average year produces about 16 million acre-feet of water (one acre foot equals a little less than 326,000 gallons) and ... in 2002, we only had one-quarter of that available to us,” he said. “We have a very cyclical climate and are a very arid, dry place — even though the snow gives an illusion that this is a wetter place than it is.”

Colorado comparison

The Nile Initiative must figure out a way for the Nile River basin nations to effectively use the water resources that start in one headwater country. Colorado would be related to Ethiopia in the African situation.

Colorado’s river system providing water for the surrounding states is one of the reasons that the African officials are studying the Colorado water system.

“Here you have some kind of compacts (or) legal rights,” Ghany said. “It’s a legal arrangement, so we are working on that record.”

The officials listened as Hummer described the prior-appropriation system, which is the way Colorado legally distributes its water.

A water right is similar to property rights in Colorado, and it goes by seniority, Hummer said. The Shoshone water rights have the most senior rights in the area, and if they are short in water, other more junior rights can have their water shut down to fuflill demand the Shoshone hydro-electric plant west of Glenwood Springs.

The biggest problem for Hummer is making sure that while all the senior rights get their water, the junior rights holders aren’t completely left out — just as one nation can’t be left without water.

“My task is to see that the resource is put to as much beneficial use as possible, and if we are doing that we are ensuring that, hopefully, a junior water rights holder is able to obtain some of their water, at least occasionally,” Hummer said.

The parallel would be one African country having rights for a certain amount of water, but not needing all of it. That country would have to be willing to give up some of its water to help the collective.

The Nile Basin Initiative has a long road ahead, though. It will likely be 15 years before any water projects can get underway, Ghany said, but Colorado was able to provide a template for the type of system it could use.

“I think they have a unique opportunity to, you know, look at what’s both positive and negative with our water rights system,” Hummer said. “With a basin the size of the Nile and all the divergent, competing needs, it’s very similar to the competing needs within our own Colorado River basin.”

For the Nile officials, it was a similar feeling.

“There were many lessons learned,” said Moustafa Tawfik Gaweesh, the former vice president of the National Water Research Center in Egypt. “Some things here can apply, and some can not.”

To view more information about the Nile Basin Initiative, visit www.nilebasin.org.

Jonathan Batuello can be reached at (970) 668-4653 or jbatuello@summitdaily.com.