Up From Dust Humans broke the environment — but we can heal it, too. Up From Dust is a podcast about the price of trying to shape the world around our needs, and the folks who are fixing our generational mistakes.

In dry years, Tuttle Creek Lake and other reservoirs keep the Kansas River flowing strong enough to provide drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people. But these manmade lakes are disappearing.

Picture three-and-a-half football fields with earth piled onto them — piled as tall as the Empire State Building.

That’s how much sediment flows into Tuttle Creek Lake each year. After decades of this, mud has eaten up so much space that about half of the lake near Manhattan has disappeared.

Put another way, about half of its volume for storing water is gone.

That’s why the

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