Aging pipes, roads, services threaten national parks

VIDEO CNN's Don Knapp looks at the aging problems of some of America's National Parks Windows Media 28K 80K  CHAT: Chat about safety in National Parks with Nelson Siler, Safety manager at Yellowstone National Park. Wednesday, August 4 -- 2p.m. ET.

August 2, 1999
Web posted at: 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT)

(CNN) -- The towering water falls, massive domes and sheer granite walls that rise thousands of feet from the valley floor are spectacular sites at Yosemite National Park.

But it's something quite mundane that allows 4 million visitors to enjoy the park annually -- a largely unseen infrastructure of sewage systems, water supplies, roads, housing, stores, food services and campsites.

At Yosemite and other national parks across the country, the infrastructure has begun to crack, park service officials say.

"In addition to being 30 years old, it's also handling two to three times as many visitors as it was 30 years ago," said Dennis Galvin of the National Park Service. "So it's not only old and worn out, it's over capacity."

Four years ago, the National Park Service trucked water to Grand Canyon visitors after a storm washed out a 30-year-old pipeline. That nearly happened again last month and trails were closed briefly.

The Park Service says the solution is money -- about $3.5 billion to fix up the nation's 378 parks, monuments and wilderness areas.

Unlike other national parks, Yosemite does have money for repairs -- nearly $200 million. The catch is that the park cannot spend it any way it likes.

INTERACTIVE:

Congress gave Yosemite the money to repair damage from a January 1997 flood there. When the Park Service tried to use that money to widen a road into the park, the Sierra Club sued to stop road construction, claiming the work was damaging the park's life blood -- the Merced River.

"They're developing roads, widening roads into the Merced River, they're developing more hotels, they're increasing the basic infrastructure in Yosemite rather than moving infrastructure out of Yosemite," said Julia Olson, a Sierra Club attorney.

Meanwhile, deterioration continues, and sometimes with deleterious environmental effects. At Yellowstone, according to the New York Times, spring thaws overloaded leaky pipes and forced crews to siphon millions of gallons of treated sewage into meadows.

So it's not just 300 million National Park visitors who suffer when the infrastructure falls apart -- it's the country's most treasured landscapes as well.

CNN Correspondent Don Knapp contributed to this report.