Glen Canyon Dam at Breaking Point —Lake Powell Below 3,490 Feet 40 Million Americans Face Power Loss

Get the Disaster Awareness Kit here: fracturedground.netlify.app In this episode: Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell at historic lows, the four bypass tubes engineers never wanted to use as primary water release, the 1983 spillway near-disaster, and what scientists call the early-21st-century mega-drought. Timestamps: 0:00 — Cold open: minimum power pool and dead pool 2:00 — Glen Canyon Dam construction, 1957–1966 4:30 — Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the US 6:00 — The 1983 spillway near-disaster: cavitation damage 8:00 — The 21st century decline: from full pool to historic lows 10:00 — The 1922 Colorado River Compact and the over-allocation 12:00 — What monitoring teams are seeing right now 14:00 — The eight turbines and the $50 million replacement reality 16:00 — The Fill Mead First proposal and the political stakes 18:00 — The 2023 snowpack year and why it didn't fix anything 20:00 — The historical megadroughts the basin has produced before Sources used in this episode: US Bureau of Reclamation — Glen Canyon Dam operations and projections US Geological Survey — Colorado River Basin streamflow data Western Area Power Administration — Glen Canyon power distribution Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory — paleoclimate megadrought records Bureau of Reclamation 1983 Spillway Damage Assessment 2022 Bureau of Reclamation 24-Month Study, Colorado River Basin #FracturedGround #DisasterDocumentary #EarthCrisis Fractured Ground — Creative Process Disclosure Fractured Ground is a fully owned and operated media property. All content is original, scripted, and produced exclusively by our team. Each episode is researched from primary sources including USGS, USBR, USACE field reports, peer-reviewed hydrology and engineering journals, and verified federal water management records. We use Adobe Premiere and After Effects for production. All licensed assets are properly attributed. Editorial Stance: We document what scientists and engineers are seeing in real time. We do not predict outcomes we cannot support with data.