East Portal: (
Satellite)
Colorado has the problem that its water supply is west of the Continental Divide and its farms and urban areas are east of the divide. The 13.1 mile long Alva B. Adams Tunnel is part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project that was built by the Bureau of Reclamation to help solve that problem. (To emphasize the severity of this water supply problem, one of the reasons for building the
Moffat Tunnel was to transport water from the West Slope to the Front Range.)
80% of the water supply is on the West Slope, but about 85% of the population lives along the Front Range. [
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The east portal is the output for the water carried by this tunnel under the Continental Divide. It is also the input for 69kv electricity being transmitted from the
Estes Park Power Plant on the Front Range to pumping stations on the West Slope.
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clui, License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA)
East Portal
"When the tunnel opened in 1947, it was the longest irrigation water tunnel in the nation. Today the annual 220,000 acre-feet of water it delivers is consumed by a variety of end users, mostly urban." |
The water input at the West Portal is under the
Grand Lake so we can't see the input. What we can see is the service entrance and where the electricity comes out of the tunnel.
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NorthernWater-tunnel
"The concrete-lined tunnel is 9-feet 9-inches in diameter, cylindrical-shaped and runs as much as 3,800 feet beneath the surface of the Continental Divide. The Adams Tunnel drops 109 feet in elevation between the West and East portals, enabling water to flow by gravity without pumping assistance. With a capacity of 550 cubic feet per second, the tunnel delivers more than 200,000 acre-feet of West Slope water annually to Northeastern Colorado. It takes water about two hours to flow the length of the tunnel....The tunnel is named for Alva B. Adams, a U.S. senator from Colorado who played a key role in convincing Congress to fund and construct the C-BT Project. At the time it was built, the Adams Tunnel was the longest tunnel in the United States to provide water for irrigation. The tunnel cost $12.8 million to construct." |
Seven construction photos from
NorthernWater-tunnel. "Construction of the Adams Tunnel began on June 23, 1940. Contractors bored the tunnel simultaneously from both portals, and when the two crews met on June 10, 1944, the alignment was off by less than the width of a penny. The first C-BT Project water flowed through the Adams Tunnel on June 23, 1947."
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ColoradoEncylopedia-construction via ColoradoEncylopedia-tunnel, Image by: Brian Werner
"Workers used railed carts like the one shown here to excavate the 13.1-mile Alva B. Adams Tunnel. Construction of the tunnel, which would become the largest water diversion project in the state, lasted between 1940 and 1944." |
The water falls 2,900' down the East Slope. Six hydropower plants were built to capture some of that energy to help offset the cost of the project. The project wasn't finished until 1957 and cost $160m, four times its original estimate.
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ColoradoEncylopedia-map, cropped via ColoradoEncylopedia-tunnel
Copyright Notes: Courtesy of Center of the American West, University of Colorado and Fulcrum Publishing. The map was created by Honey Lindburg and originally appeared on pages 124-5 of A Ditch in Time by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Jason L. Hanson, published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2012. |
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