Cadillac Desert (49 page)

Alternatively, you could build a whole series of dams at a more or less equal elevation on the bigger rivers of coastal Oregon and, at a level approximate to the elevation of the upper Sacramento Valley, run a gravity-diversion aqueduct from reservoir to reservoir, picking up half-million-acre-foot increments as a bus picks up passengers, then run the aqueduct beneath the Siskiyou Mountains and plop the water into Shasta Lake, then lead it south from there. You could take millions and millions of acre-feet out of the Pend Oreille in Washington, an obscure river bigger than the Wabash or the Hudson or the Sacramento, and move it by gravity—aqueduct-tunnel-aqueduct-tunnel-aqueduct-tunnel-from Albeni Falls, near the Canadian border, across the deserts of eastern Washington and Central Oregon all the way to California, passing by the Rogue and the Illinois and picking up some surplus flows, with the end result that California’s developed water yield would be increased by nearly one-half. “The total length of the aqueduct... would be about 1,020 miles, of which about 290 miles would be tunnel and 40 miles in siphon. No estimates of cost were made for this plan because the necessary length of aqueduct causes it to appear unattractive.” Most or all of these diversions, the
Report of the Chief
implied, would
have
to be built, sooner or later. “Regardless of magnitude, scope, and timing of the undertaking, if it can be shown that moving surplus waters of the Northwest to water-deficient areas elsewhere is in the realm of sound public interest, it is, in Reclamation’s opinion and half century of experience, only a matter of time before exhaustion of nearer water supplies forces the undertaking of a suitable project for that purpose.” All of this, however, might still be fifty years in the future. For now, the immediate need was in the Colorado Basin and its parasitic appendage, southern California, and the obvious river of rescue was the Klamath.

Remote, wild, half-forgotten, the Klamath was a perfect example of how God had left the perfection and completion of California to the Bureau of Reclamation. The second-largest river in the state—three times the size of the third-largest river—it was imprisoned by mountains and hopelessly remote from Los Angeles. Spilling out of Klamath Lake in southern Oregon, a huge shallow apparition cradled between mountains and desert, the river drops across the California border and bends its way westward toward the coast. Then it dips suddenly southward toward populated California, and, as if recognizing covetous intent, immediately doubles back on itself and flees to Oregon through the plunging topography of the Siskiyou Range. Diverting the Klamath would be easy along the first half of its course, but it doesn’t contain much water yet. A hundred miles from the Pacific, however, rainfall shoots up to a hundred inches, the Trinity and Scott and Salmon rivers pour in, and the Klamath is suddenly huge. On a random day late in February of 1983, after a week of rain, the Klamath was flowing at four thousand cubic feet per second below Klamath Lake and at 148,000 cfs near its mouth, a Niagara-size flow in a canyon you can bat a ball across. Small tributaries were tumbling oven-size rocks like ice cubes. To the Bureau, the Klamath’s huge and reliable winter surges were only its second greatest attraction—the first was its availability. The Klamath was wasting twelve million acre-feet to the sea with hardly a claim on it. Its principal appropriators were salmon, steelhead, and bears.

To capture the Klamath, you had to dam it twelve miles from the Pacific, then move the water in reverse across, or under, a hundred miles of the most rugged topography in the United States. The dam, which would be called Ah Pah, would occupy the river’s last gorge. It would stand 813 feet high. The Pan Am Building in New York City stands 805 feet high. A man-made El Capitán, it would pool water seventy miles up the Klamath and forty miles up the Trinity to form a reservoir with 15,050,000 acre-feet of gross storage. (The reservoir that obliterated Johnstown, Pennsylvania, held fifty thousand acre-feet.) The Klamath, both forks of the Trinity, and the Salmon River would, for all practical purposes, disappear; 98 percent of the salmon and steelhead spawning grounds would be lost; at least seven towns would vanish, including the main settlements of the Hoopa tribe, from whose language the dam’s name was borrowed, and whose reservation it would drown. “Only minor improvements [i.e., towns] exist in this [the reservoir] area,” said the United Western report. The site, in a dense metasandstone formation, was presumed to be safe, although it “probably contains minor faults.”

Trinity Tunnel, which would spin water out of the bottom back side of the reservoir and carry it to the Central Valley, would be sixty miles long, Its shape would resemble a horseshoe, and its diameter would be thirty-seven feet. There would be no tunnel remotely like it anywhere in the world. The Delaware Aqueduct, stretching from the Catskill Mountains to Westchester County, is eighty-five miles long, but its diameter is only fourteen feet. Trinity Tunnel could hold four passenger trains operating on two levels. It alone would cost nearly half a billion dollars, in 1951, and it was merely the longest and biggest of numerous tunnels. The Tehachapi Tunnel, forty miles long, would move the water through the Transverse Ranges, which cordon off Los Angeles from the rest of the state. Seven known fault zones would be crossed along the aqueduct route, and one of them, the San Andreas Fault, would present a fracture zone at least two miles wide in the middle of the Tehachapi Tunnel which could pose “unusual construction problems.” An ordinary tunnel would shear if the fault slipped—it slipped nearly twenty feet in the 1906 quake—leaving Los Angeles unwashed and unquenched. “Extra-heavy supports would be required throughout this zone.”

The cost of everything—Ah Pah Dam, the other dams, the tunnels, the aqueducts, the pumps, the canals, the receiving reservoirs, and an item called a Peripheral Canal, which would be built to carry the Sacramento’s greatly swollen flow around California’s Delta—would be $3,293,050,000. It was an incredible bargain; today, a couple of nuclear power plants cost much more than that. Had the Bureau reckoned how expensive life was going to become, the Klamath Diversion might well have been built. “In those days, almost everything the Bureau proposed was being built,” Kuiper says. “But Straus decided to move cautiously on this one. If you read the report, you’ll see that we were always talking about ‘orderly development.’ That’s code talk for building at a deliberate pace, taking care to butter everyone’s bread, instead of going gung-ho, which is what they did on the Missouri. In California, you had two choices: you could build a lot of little projects on tributaries of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, or you could built one huge project on the Klamath. I don’t know whether it made better sense to do one or the other. What I do know is that Mike Straus was constitutionally incapable of seeing that the clock was already running out on these tremendous projects. He thought it was the other way around—that the Bureau would keep building bigger and bigger things. The only way Mike knew how to think was bigger and bigger. He and Bill Warne were sure the Klamath Diversion was going to be built someday, so they didn’t try to railroad it through.”

McCasland didn’t help. Contentious and prickly, he may have been a fine engineer, but he was the public relations equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Without asking clearance from the commissioner’s office, he wrote an article describing the Klamath Diversion for Civil
Engineering
in 1952. Northern California’s thirty-five years of passionate opposition to southern California’s diversion plans can be traced directly to that article. McCasland would not even say that these Pantagruelian waterworks would take care of the southland’s need for all time: “The plan described as the Northern California Diversion,” he wrote, “would not by any means constitute a complete water supply for the Southwest. It would meet the most imminent demands... but it would more probably constitute the initial stage of a large plan to serve much wider markets a future economy might dictate.” Clarence Kuiper says, “What I remember about that time is the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from Oregon and Washington asking me if it was true that the Bureau was planning to divert the Columbia River.” But the outrage cascading down from the Pacific Northwest was the least of the Bureau’s problems. Its main problem was that Los Angeles, for whose benefit the Klamath Diversion had mainly been conceived, was unalterably opposed to it, too.

The idea of the city it was trying to save vilifying the project it had planned in order to save it left the Bureau of Reclamation speechless. Had its engineers accepted a thing or two about law and psychology, however, they wouldn’t have been the least surprised. Los Angeles, in the middle of an epic feud with Arizona over Colorado River water rights, saw the Klamath Diversion as a ploy to encourage it to relinquish its claim on the share of the river that it wanted to consider its own. In fact, if any Californian even
mentioned
the idea of going north for water, Los Angeles came down on him like Thor. When Republican Congressman Richard J. Welch of San Francisco did just that, the Los Angeles
Daily News
denounced his idea as “the kiss of Judas.” “This San Franciscan,” it fumed, “is trying not to succor but to sucker us.” As Carey McWilliams wrote in
California: The Great Exception,
“To suggest that Colorado River water was not the only water which might be made available in southern California was, of course, an act of treason, a betrayal.” The Republican Party of the state, with its center of power in Los Angeles and Orange County, went so far as to mount an effort to excommunicate poor Welch, who, as bewildered as the Bureau by then, said he was only trying to help.

The Bureau was flummoxed. Copies of the UWI report were buried in the archives in the regional office in Salt Lake City, where they sat under lock and key. Before he could do more damage, McCasland was transferred to a desk job in Washington, and young Kuiper was left with the job of repairing the wreckage his boss had created. The Klamath Diversion, potentially the greatest engineering scheme of all time, was dumped on the scrapheap of human dreams. “The whole thing kind of backfired on them,” said Kuiper in 1981, still wryly amused after all those years.

The Eisenhower era put transbasin diversions into the Colorado on hold for at least another eight years. Ike’s Interior Secretary, Douglas McKay, a Chevrolet dealer from Portland, Oregon, followed the honorable Republican tradition of using the office as a vending machine for timber and minerals, but recoiled at the idea of an activist government marketing water and power. Ike’s water-development policy, announced shortly after his inauguration, was that there would be “no new starts” during his administration, especially if the production of power was involved. His own Republican allies from the western states would soon make him eat his words, but his immediate problem, after his inauguration, was finding a Reclamation Commissioner who would do his bidding—an exact opposite of Mike Straus. Since the Bureau had been stuffed with liberals, public-power advocates, and super-engineers of the McCasland ilk during the previous twenty years of Democratic reign, he wouldn’t be easy to find within the Bureau—whence commissioners traditionally came. After leaving the post vacant for several months, the Republicans finally came up with Wilbur Dexheimer, the Bureau’s assistant chief construction engineer. Dexheimer was handsome, amiable, and a competent engineer, but he was, as Winston Churchill said of Clement Attlee, a modest man with much to be modest about. He had spent his entire career in the Denver engineering headquarters, and he was an ingenue at politics, which was the breath of life to Mike Straus. Dexheimer was the first to admit that he was the consummately wrong choice for the job. As soon as he was appointed, he called his regional commissioners to Washington, gathered them in his office, and blurted out, “I don’t have to tell you guys that I’m the least likely person in Creation to be sitting at this desk. I’m ignorant as hell about what goes on in this town, but by God they made me commissioner and here I am and now you’ve got to follow my orders even if you and I think they stink.”

To the routed myrmidons of the New Deal, the golden age of water development seemed truly over. But Republican principles would prove to be no match for the stark imperative of the American desert. In 1956, Ike would end up signing the Colorado River Storage Project Act against his better judgment, and the budgets of both the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers would increase dramatically during his administration. In the lower Colorado Basin, however, Eisenhower had an excuse to do nothing. Until the Central Arizona Project was given final shape—and that couldn’t happen until the legal battle had ended and it was determined who had rights to what water—the river’s looming deficit would remain an inconsequential fact. Once the lawsuit was settled, however, the Bureau would face two seemingly insuperable problems at once: how to build the most expensive water project of all time; and, even worse, how to authorize an even
more
expensive augmentation scheme that would give the Colorado Basin enough water for everything it was planning to build.

On a map of Arizona, the Colorado River can be seen making a wide circle around the northern and eastern half of the state. At every point along that six-hundred-mile sojourn, the populated center of the state is walled off from the river by mountains. In the north, the river flows in a bottomless canyon, a mile below its southern rim; to lift it out of there and lead it to Phoenix would be out of the question—even though the water, once out of the Grand Canyon, could flow downhill all the way. Closer to its mouth, the river escapes its canyon confines and flows across broad sandy wastes, but numerous ranges stand between the river and Tucson and Phoenix—the Aquarius Cliffs, the Black Mountains, the Maricopa Mountains, the Saucera Range. Regardless of where one located the point of diversion, to move a portion of the Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix would involve a pump lift of at least twelve hundred feet. Pumping irrigation water there would be like taking it out of the Hudson River and lifting it over the World Trade Center in order to water lawns on Long Island. The CAP was to be, first and foremost, an
irrigation
project, a rescue project to save the dying farmlands between Phoenix and Tucson; the cities would also get some water, but the farmers would receive the overwhelming share. Hardly anywhere on earth, however, is water lifted that high in order to irrigate crops, unless the water flows nearly as far downhill somewhere along its route as it was lifted uphill, so that much of the energy required to lift it can be recovered. Even then, the Second Law of Thermodynamics exacts a heavy toll: for every hundred units of energy expended to lift the water, only seventy or so can be recovered on the way back down. Using the most optimistic predictions—high-value crops, high crop prices, dirt-cheap power from preexisting dams—the Central Arizona Project was still likely to need more public welfare than anything the Bureau had built.