Cadillac Desert (31 page)

The main stem of the Columbia River didn’t have a single dam on it until 1933, when the Puget Sound Power and Light Company went out on its own and built a run-of-the-river dam called Rock Island, which produced 212,000 kilowatts of power—a mind-boggling amount in its day. Five years later, Bonneville Dam was finished and generated almost three times as much power. In 1941 came Grand Coulee; in 1953, McNary Dam; in 1955, Chief Joseph Dam; in 1957, The Dalles, contributing 1,807,000 kilowatts to the seven million or so that had already been wrung out of the river. In that same year, the Grant County Public Utility District finished Priest Rapids Dam, which added another 788,500 kilowatts. In 1961, the Chelan County PUD came back and built Rocky Reach Dam, with a capacity one million kilowatts greater than the dam by which it had gotten things off to a start twenty-eight years before. And it still wasn’t over. In 1963, the Grant County PUD added Wanapum Dam and another 831,250 kilowatts. In 1967, the Douglas County PUD completed Wells Dam. The Corps of Engineers, which had built Bonneville and Chief Joseph and McNary and The Dalles, got back into the picture in 1968 with John Day Dam, whose 2,160,000 kilowatts were second only to Grand Coulee. In that year, the Canadians finally joined in, building Keenleyside Dam, whose sole purpose was to equalize the upper river’s flow throughout the year for the benefit of navigation and power production. In 1973, they added Mica Dam, which formed the largest reservoir on the river in a remote wilderness not far from the Columbia’s headwaters. Thirteen tremendous dams in forty years.

And these were just the
main-stem
dams. As they were going up, the Columbia tributaries were also being chinked full of dams. Libby Dam on the Kootenai River. Albeni Falls and Boudary dams on the Pend Oreille. Cabinet Gorge and Noxon Rapids dams on the Clark Fork. Kerr and Hungry Horse on the Flathead. Chandler and Roza dams on the Yakima. Ice Harbor Dam, Lower Monumental Dam, Little Goose Dam, Lower Granite Dam, Oxbow Dam, Hells Canyon Dam, Brownlee Dam, and Palisades Dam on the Snake. Dworshak Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater. Anderson Ranch Dam on the South Fork of the Boise. Pelton and Round Butte dams on the Deschutes. Big Cliff, Foster, Green Peter, and Detroit dams on the three forks of the Santiam River. Cougar Dam on the South Fork of the McKenzie. Dexter, Lookout Point, and Hills Creek dams on the Willamette. Merwin Dam, Yale Dam, and Swift Dam on the Lewis River. Layfield and Mossyrock dams on the Cowlitz. Thirty-six great dams on one river and its tributaries—a dam a year. The Age of Dams.

The Corps of Engineers and the region’s public utilities played a big role in the damming of the Pacific Northwest because it had in abundance what the rest of the region lacked—water—so many of the dams were built for flood control, nagivation, or power. Everywhere else in the West, however, where deserts were the rule and irrigation was the be-all and end-all of existence, the Bureau reigned supreme. Within its first thirty years, it had built about three dozen projects. During the next thirty years, it built nineteen dozen more. The Burnt River Project, the Cachuma Project, the Mancos Project, the Ogden River Project, the Collbran Project, the Gila Project, the Pine River Project, the Palisades Project, the Weber Basin Project, the Columbia Basin Project, and the Central Valley Project. Shasta Dam, Parker Dam, Friant Dam, Davis Dam, Laguna Dam, Canyon Ferry Dam, Cascade Dam, Flaming Gorge Dam. Cedar Bluff Lake, Paonia Reservoir, Kirwin Reservoir, Webster Reservoir, Pathfinder Reservoir, Waconda Lake, Clair Engle Lake, Lake Berryessa, Lake C. W. McConaughy, Enders Reservoir, Box Butte Reservoir. The Tucumcari Project, the Palo Verde Project, the San Angelo Project, the Canadian River Project, the Crooked River Project, the Kendrick Project, the Hubbard Project, the Hyrun Project, the Eden Project, the W. C. Austin Project, the Colorado—Big Thompson Project, the Pecos River Basin Water Conservation Project (“conservation” meaning, in this case, the virtual drying-up of the Pecos River), the Mercedes Division, the Middle Rio Grande Project. Trinity Dam, Keswick Dam, Folsom Dam, Morrow Point Dam, Blue Mesa Dam. The Oroville-Tonasket Unit of the Okanogan Similkameen Division of the Columbia Basin Project. Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado.

By 1956, the Congress had voted 110 separate authorizations for the Bureau of Reclamation, some encompassing a dozen or more irrigation projects and dams. Of these, seventy-seven—nearly three-quarters—were authorized between 1928 and 1956, along with hundreds of projects built by the Corps of Engineers in the East and West. In that astonishingly brief twenty-eight-year period between the first preparations for Hoover Dam and the passage of the Colorado River Storage Project Act, the most fateful transformation that has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere, was wrought.

It was profound change—profound and permanent. You can levee a river, dredge it, riprap it, channelize it, straighten it, do almost anything to it except build a dam on it, and unless you maintain your works diligently, nature will soon take the river back. Simple diversion works of great ancient civilizations collapsed not long after the civilizations themselves did; for the most part, a remnant here and there is all that remains. Had the Assyrians built Grand Coulee Dam, howver, it would sit exactly where it does today, looking exactly as it did when it was built. The only thing different is that the dam would no longer function as a dam. It would be a waterfall. The reservoir behind it would have long since silted up.

And the effects would go far beyond the natural world. In the Northwest, the dams produced so much cheap hydroelectricity that hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to the region during and after the war did not bother to insulate their homes. Insulation was expensive; electricity was dirt-cheap. In 1974, $196.01 worth of power from Con Edison in New York would have cost $24 if purchased from Seattle City Light. (For decades, the Northwest and British Columbia have had the highest rates of electricity consumption in the world.) The result was that by the 1970s, to everyone’s amazement, the seemingly limitless hydroelectric bonanza was coming to an end; brown-outs were being predicted for the 1980s. Since the good damsites were gone, the region’s utilities and their federal power broker, the Bonneville Power Administration—another product of the go-go years—launched a program of coal and nuclear powerplant construction which, viewed in retrospect, seems more like dementia than the rational, orderly planning it was purported to be. Of the twenty-four thousand-megawatt plants that were to be built under the Washington Public Power Supply System—one a year—five were begun, only to be scrapped or mothballed, half-completed, a few years later, threatening to cause the biggest municipal bond default in history. The cost of their construction, driven by inflation and hyperactive interest rates, drove electricity rates up, which immediately drove demand down, which drove rates further up, which drove demand further down—a self-perpetuating vortex known among municipal bond traders and their hapless victims and the region’s hollow-eyed utilities as “death spiral.” No one knows where this fiasco—now referred to simply by the power consortium’s onomatopoetic acronym WPPSS—may end, but more than $6 billion has been invested in nuclear plants that may never produce a watt of power. The blame for it—if it is worth laying blame at all—has to fall on the region’s forty-year love affair with dams.

It was, of course, a love affair not limited to the Northwest or even the West. The whole country wanted more dams. In Appalachia, the Tennessee Valley Authority had an answer to poverty: dams. No river in the entire world has as much of its course under reservoirs as the Tennessee; by the late 1960s, it was hard to find a ten-mile free-flowing stretch between dams. The Missouri is a close second; about seven hundred miles in its middle reaches became a series of gigantic stairstep reservoirs. In Texas and Oklahoma, between 1940 and 1975, something like eight million acres of land were submerged by artificial lakes. Much of this land was in the eastern part of those states; it was exceptionally fertile (as were the bottomlands along the Tennessee) and visited by adequate rainfall, making it some of the best farmland in the nation. No one seemed bothered by the spectacle of a government creating expensive farmland out of deserts in the West while drowning millions of acres of perfect farmland in the East. If there was a stretch of free-flowing river anywhere in the country, our reflex action was to erect a dam in its path.

There were legitimate reasons, of course, to build a fair number of those thousands of dams. Hydropower obviously was one; the Columbia dams helped prevent the horror of Nazism from blackening the entire world. Some new irrigation projects made economic sense, as late as the 1940s and 1950s (though virtually none did after then). The Tennessee and Red rivers were prone to destructive floods, as was the Columbia—as were many rivers throughout the country. A better solution, in many cases, would have been to discourage development in floodplains, but the country—least of all the Congress—wasn’t interested in that. For a dam, whether or not it made particularly good sense, whether or not it decimated a salmon fishery or drowned a gorgeous stretch of wild river, was a bonanza to the constituents of the Congressman in whose district it was located—especially the engineering and construction firms that became largely dependent on the government for work. The whole business was like a pyramid scheme—the many (the taxpayers) were paying to enrich the few—but most members of Congress figured that if they voted for everyone else’s dams, someday
they
would get a dam, too.

And this, as much as the economic folly and the environmental damage, was the legacy of the go-go years: the corruption of national politics. Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they were the oil can that lubricated the nation’s legislative machinery. Important legislation—an education bill, a foreign aid bill, a conservation bill—was imprisoned until the President agreed to let a powerful committee chairman tack on a rider authorizing his pet dam. Franklin Roosevelt had rammed a lot of his public-works programs through a Congress that was, if not resistant, then at least recumbent. A generation or two later, however, it was Congress that was writing omnibus public-works bills authorizing as much as $20 billion worth of water projects at a stroke and defying threats of presidential vetoes. Most members who voted for such bills had not the faintest idea what was in them; they didn’t care; they didn’t dare look. All that mattered was that there was something in it for them. What had begun as an emergency program to put the country back to work, to restore its sense of self-worth, to settle the refugees of the Dust Bowl, grew into a nature-wrecking, money-eating monster that our leaders lacked the courage or ability to stop.

CHAPTER SIX

Rivals in Crime

O
n the 16th of August, 1962, Major General William F. Cassidy, the director of civil works for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, gave a speech titled “The Future of Water Development” before a gathering of his peers in Davis, California. Considering what Cassidy had to say, the speech attracted surprisingly little attention in the press.

“Before white men came to North America,” the General began, “it is estimated that about one million Indians inhabited the region between the Canadian border and the Gulf of Mexico. The streams were unpolluted, the forests still stood, and the plow had not broken the plains. They had the resources of a continent at their disposal, and about four hundred acres of arable land for every man, woman, and child. Yet they often starved—because they lacked the capacity to develop their resources.

“In the 1890s,” Cassidy continued, “the United States had about seventy-seven acres of cultivated land per person. Before World War I, about four acres. Today, we have only about two acres of cultivated land per person. Yet the United States maintains the highest level of living known to history, it exports food to other nations, and it has even accumulated substantial surpluses of a few crops. This is the result of increasingly intensive resource development.”

But all of this resource development had been a mere warm-up exercise compared with what was still to come. “During the next twenty years,” Cassidy went on, “we estimate that we will have to provide some 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage at a cost of about $15 billion; about thirteen thousand miles of new or improved inland waterways; about sixty new or improved commercial harbors; thirty million kilowatts of hydroelectric power-generating capacity; some eleven thousand miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements; and recreational facilities for perhaps 300 million visitors at our reservoirs....” If all of that seemed “unduly large or visionary,” Cassidy admonished, “let us remember the responsibilities our nation is facing.”

It is worth taking a moment to put some of these figures in perspective. In 1962, the total amount of federally built reservoir storage in the nation was somewhere around 300 million acre-feet. In twenty years, Cassidy wanted to more than double that. Every year, the Mississippi River carries about 355 million acre-feet of water out to sea, the runoff of most of the United States from Pennsylvania to Montana. In twenty years, according to the Corps of Engineers, we were going to put the equivalent of 90 percent of that water behind dams. In 1962, there were 37,342 megawatts of installed hydroelectric generating capacity in the United States; by 1982, that figure was nearly to double. By 1962, nearly all the major rivers in the United States—long reaches of the Mississippi, the Snake, the Columbia, the Illinois, the Missouri, the Sacramento, the Susquehanna, the Red, the Delaware, the Tennessee, the Apalachicola, the Savannah—had been dredged, realigned, straitjacketed, riprapped, diked, leveed, stabilized, and otherwise made over in order to accommodate barge and freighter traffic. In twenty years, we were going to add or “improve” thirteen thousand more miles.