Cadillac Desert (65 page)

Walking along the East Branch Aqueduct, you see people strolling, bicycling, and fishing as if this were a river through a city park instead of a concrete highway of water under a blazing sun in a shadeless desert where it rains seven or eight times a year. The Department of Water Resources stocks the aqueduct with fish—that way it can write off a fraction of the project’s cost to recreation—but fish seem to find their way in there anyway. In fact, sections of the aqueduct have respectable fishing for striped bass, which cannot easily tolerate the pollution of Chesapeake Bay or spawn in the freakish cross-Delta currents that the project pumps have caused, but which don’t seem to mind a three-hundred-foot lift in a pressurized elevator of water. This turbid, computer-controlled, concrete-walled river is the unlikeliest habitat imaginable for striped bass—as fitting a symbol of wild, fecund nature as one could find. The water project seems as make-believe as California itself, in its relentless quest to deny its desert heart.

Aside from lying about the true cost of the State Water Project, Pat Brown and his water resources chief, Bill Warne, had been less than candid about another matter of supreme importance: how much water the initial bonds would actually buy. Most Californians, it seems, believed they were buying four million acre-feet or more. But, as early as October of 1960, Joe Jensen had predicted that the bonds would never suffice to develop that much, and he was right. The initial facilities, it turned out, could deliver around 2.5 million acre-feet, perhaps three to three and a third million in wetter years—at least a million acre-feet less than the various cities and irrigation districts had signed up to buy. Meanwhile, population projections for southern California continued their horrifying march; in 1961, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was estimating that forty million people would live in the South Coast area by 1990. By February of 1962, Alfred Golze, Bill Warne’s chief engineer, was already calling for new reservoir construction on the North Coast as early as 1972; Warne himself said that “new reservoirs, dams, tunnels, and diversion projects must be undertaken somewhere in the North Coast area within the next twenty years.”

As it turned out, a splendid opportunity to do just that arrived sooner than Warne dared hope. In December of 1964, California was hit by floods that were even wilder than the great floods of 1955. In three days, from December 21 to 24, Blue Canyon on the American River recorded twenty inches of rain. All the rivers were roaring, from Big Sur to the Oregon border and beyond. But the river that rampaged most was the Eel. The Eel rose seventy-two feet from its bed. It snapped bridges with surgical precision; it uprooted three-hundred-foot red-woods; it swept fifty million board feet of timber out to sea—driftwood which, for the most part, is still piled along California’s beaches. At Scotia, near its mouth, the Eel was carrying the Mississippi River in a garment bag; 765,000 cubic feet of water were going by each second. Every town along the river was damaged—some were never seen again. The high-water mark can still be seen along the Avenue of the Giants, displayed on a number of redwood trees. It is about three stories above the road.

The Christmas flood—the second “hundred-year” flood in just nine years—had Brown, Warne, and the Army Corps of Engineers issuing statements expressing profound dismay while they privately rubbed their hands with glee. Within months, the Corps, the Bureau, and the Department of Water Resources had locked arms as the State-Federal Interagency Task Force, ready, once and for all, to choke California’s untamed rivers into submission. Every river on the North Coast, except the Smith and the Klamath, was to get at least one big dam; the various forks of the Eel were to get eight. But the Bureau and the Corps kept getting into scraps over who was to build what first, and Pat Brown’s term was running out, so, one by one, the dams fell into obscurity. By 1966, when Ronald Reagan became governor, the only dam in which strong interest was still being expressed was the largest, Dos Rios, on the Middle Fork of the Eel. With twice the storage capacity of Shasta Lake, Dos Rios was the ideal addition to the State Water project; it could deliver another 900,000 acre-feet, almost enough to bring the total yield, in normal years, up to the 4,230,000 acre-feet the state had promised to deliver. The site was reasonably close to the Central Valley; all one had to do was dig a twenty-one-mile tunnel through the Yolla Bolly Mountains and dump the water into Stony Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento.

Dos Rios had three things going against it, though the Eel had acquired such a black reputation that none seemed likely to prevent its being built. One was the fact that it would do nothing to control the Eel. During the Christmas flood, more than 500,000 cubic feet per second had poured out of the South and North forks and the main Eel, which would all remain undammed. What did it matter if one’s house was under twelve feet of water or eleven feet four inches? Those eight inches at Scotia were the sum total of the flood crest that Dos Rios would contain; a local rancher, Richard Wilson, who had a degree in agricultural engineering from Dartmouth, proved it, and the Corps could only wish him wrong.

Another drawback was that the reservoir would drown an Indian reservation and the town of Covelo—population two thousand—but that sort of thing had been done many times before. (The Corps had included the flooding of the reservation in its benefit-cost analysis, but had it down as a
benefit
because the Indians would get a “nicer” town somewhere else.) The third drawback was that the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t particularly interested.

Reagan, as a westerner, should have been a friend of dams, but he was growing more conservative by the hour, and true conservatives tend to dislike great public works. He also distrusted the Corps of Engineers—a feeling which the Corps, if anything, seemed to reinforce. Reagan’s resources secretary, Norman Livermore, remembers asking the Corps to do two cost-benefit analyses—one using the 3¼ percent interest rate which the Corps planned to use, the other using the 6¼ percent rate that reflected economic reality. “When they gave it to me,” remembers Livermore, “I looked at the two columns, and the bottom line was exactly the same. I took it into a cabinet meeting and really got a laugh.”

For four and a half years, Reagan stalled on Dos Rios while the water lobby was practically battering down his door. The head of his Department of Water Resources, Bill Gianelli, a short, square man with a Vince Lombardi temperament and an American flag perpetually stuck in his lapel, was, according to Richard Wilson—who was the leader of the ragtag opposition—an “absolute zealot” in favor of building the dam. So was Don Clausen, the Republican Congressman representing the North Coast. But Wilson was a friend of Norman Livermore’s, and Livermore had Reagan’s ear. According to Wilson, when the governor realized he finally had to say yes or no, he asked Livermore to give him every argument he could think of against the dam. When Livermore was finished, he emerged from Reagan’s office and almost fell into the arms of Don Clausen, who was waiting to give Reagan his arguments
for
the dam. Clausen was a voluble and persuasive man, but later he confided to his intimates what had really happened during the meeting. Halfway through it, Clausen said dispiritedly, the governor had fallen asleep.

Wilson insists he got the story from Livermore himself, though Livermore, still a Reagan loyalist in 1984, said he “couldn’t remember” it. Whatever the case, in 1969, Reagan finally announced that he would not support Dos Rios Dam. In the press release explaining his reasoning, he talked about costs, poor economics, the frailty of the flood-control rationale. Privately, though, Reagan was upset about flooding the Round Valley reservation. “We’ve broken enough treaties with the Indians already,” the old cowboy actor is reported to have said.

By the time Reagan left Sacramento, in 1974, the Department of Water Resources was predicting that the dreaded shortfall—demand for water greater than supply of water—might be as little as fifteen years away. To plan the final phase of the State Water Project, get it approved and funded, and build it would easily require fifteen years. Through an irony some found delicious, then, the person who took it upon himself to complete the project that Pat Brown had left unfinished was none other than the apostle of the “era of limits,” the first politician to proclaim that “small is beautiful” and “less is more”: Jerry Brown—Pat Brown’s son.

“He did it for the old man” was how Jerry Brown’s last loyalists explained the spectacle of the younger Brown promoting what seemed certain to become the most expensive water project in the history of the world. Depending on which of the Brown administration’s estimates one believed—and a new one seemed to appear every six months or so—the cost of completing the project was either astonishing or flabbergasting. What Pat Brown hadn’t foreseen, when he underfunded the bond issue to ensure that the voters would pass it, was inflation. Because of inflation, it would cost two to five times more to deliver the project’s last 1,730,000 acre-feet than it had cost to deliver the first 2.5 million. The most detailed estimate, released by the DWR in 1980, pegged the cost at $11.6 billion. Interest on the bonds—based on a rate of 9 percent, which was then three points too low—would add another $12 billion. It was unheard-of. The only comparable schemes anywhere in the world were Canada’s James Bay Project and Itaipu Dam, which would end up costing $19 billion and help Brazil dig itself a bottomless financial hole. But Itaipu would at least generate 12,500 megawatts of electricity to help pay for itself. Brown’s Phase Two water plan would
consume
an awesome amount of power, because the water, cubic miles of it, would be pumped not just uphill but over a mountain range.

Jerry Brown’s dilemma—which was insoluble, but which he thought he could solve anyway—was trying to please the water lobby and his large environmental constituency at the same time. He wanted a project, but he wanted it to be “environmentally sound.” To be environmentally sound, there could be no on-stream storage—no dams or reservoirs on any significant wild streams. The North Coast rivers, with 29 percent of the state’s runoff, were therefore off limits. Instead, Brown wanted to skim high “surplus” flows from the Sacramento River during the winter and spring and store them. But all the natural storage basins were at elevations well
above
the river. His Department of Water Resources engineers, acting on orders some of them considered insane, finally settled on a basin in the foothills of the Yolla Bolly Mountains, near Red Bluff, which had a stream running through it and a couple of small preexisting flood-control dams. They would run a twenty-mile aqueduct up there, up a thousand-foot slope, and dump the Sacramento surplus flows in. The reservoir, to be called the Glenn “Complex,” would be as large as San Francisco Bay. It would submerge both preexisting reservoirs and a couple of small towns. There would be some contribution from Stony Creek, but not much; a tremendous amount of energy would be required to pump water uphill. A second off-stream reservoir—smaller, but still a third the size of Shasta Lake—would be created farther south, in the foothills near Mount Diablo. Below there, water was already being pumped three hundred feet uphill for storage in San Luis Reservoir—another off-stream site—and farther south it was being lifted to improbable heights by the Edmonston Pumps. If it was all built, the California Water Project would require about as much electricity as both units of the $5.4 billion Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor could produce, and Brown
didn’t
want that built. Where, then, would the energy come from? The DWR set loose a bewildering flurry of “soft path” proposals—geothermal plants, wind machines, solar-generating ponds. The meanest of the governor’s critics, taking note of his interest in Buddhism, said it was all going to be powered by yaks.

Brown was so sympathetic to environmentalists in other ways that a lot of them were hesitant to oppose the plan. (The California Sierra Club’s leadership first endorsed it, only to be overturned in a referendum taken to the members at large.) After all, his director of water resources was Ron Robie, a smart, elfin, fast-talking lawyer who had been instrumental, while on the Water Resources Control Board, in writing decision 1422, a decree requiring minimum fresh-water flows through the state’s most important estuary, the Delta. Robie’s assistant director was Gerald Meral, a former staff scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. Meral, a gaunt, bearded zoologist, was a great fan of wild rivers, an expert whitewater kayaker—there was even a falls and pool on the Tuolumne River named for him. How could people like Jerry Brown, Ron Robie, and Gerry Meral propose anything really bad?

One answer came from Tom Graff, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund and Meral’s former colleague. The centerpiece of Brown’s plan was called the Peripheral Canal, an outsize channel to be constructed around the collapsing Delta. The Peripheral Canal had been a top priority of the water interests for forty years. What Brown wanted to do to win the environmentalists’ and northern California’s support was guarantee minimum releases to the Delta from the canal—a big surge of water would be let out every few miles, turning the Brown Canal, in effect, into a giant sprinkler hose. Robie and Meral argued that their plan would mimic the primordial river inflows and eliminate the cross-flows caused by the Delta pumps; in so doing, it would help salmon and striped bass spawn and actually improve the fishery. In fact, if one listened to them long enough, the whole $11.6 billion scheme was mainly for the sake of the Delta fish. But Graff pointed out that the Peripheral Canal would remove another couple of million acre-feet of water from the Delta and San Francisco Bay, water that normally went through at high flows. Delta outflows had already been reduced from 35 million acre-feet to around 17 million, and the fresh water that still managed to escape the project pumps was needed to wash pollution out of the bay; besides, the whole bay ecosystem had grown dependent on large seasonal fresh-water flows over tens of thousands of years. Who was to say that the bay, having already seen its fresh-water outflow decline by 55 percent, wasn’t on the brink of ecological ruin?