Cadillac Desert (50 page)

A simple matter of physics, then, made the Central Arizona Project even worse, in an economic sense, than the Colorado River Storage Project. But politics demanded that it be built, and in the 1960s, Arizona had power. Barry Goldwater was the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; Carl Hayden was the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He could, if he wanted, hold up every other water project in the country until his state was satisfied. And there was the issue of equity. California had its water, Nevada had its water, the upper basin was developing its water, and Arizona still had nothing. What were a couple of billion dollars in the face of these other, more important concerns?

Still, something would have to be done about the project’s horrifically poor economic rationale. And something would ultimately have to be done about the fact that the river now seemed certain to dry up if the CAP was built. Something—but what? The obvious answer was a couple of big cash register dams that could generate enough power, and enough money, to give Arizona’s irrigation farmers the 90-percent subsidy they would probably need. If the dams were big enough, there might be enough revenue left over to begin a fund that, in the future, could help build the gigantic augmentation project that the basin would require.

But where could one locate the dams? There were no sites for big dams left in Arizona, and besides, the Gila River system didn’t have nearly enough water to develop the kind of power the Bureau had in mind. California still had a lot of undeveloped hydroelectric potential, but it wouldn’t think of allowing dams to be built within its borders whose revenues would allow Arizona to divert water it was then using. The Colorado River Storage Project was cementing dams in all the best hydroelectric canyons in the upper basin. New Mexico’s rivers had neither the sites nor the water flows. There was only one place in the entire Southwest where reliable water flowed through a section of river with a thousand-foot drop—the Grand Canyon.

The proposal for Grand Canyon dams was officially revealed on January 21, 1964, with the release of something called the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. One had only to read the title to see that, now that another New Deal Democrat was enfranchised in the White House (Lyndon Johnson was about to beat Barry Goldwater with 60 percent of the popular vote), the Bureau had happily returned to the mode of thinking prevalent during the FDR and Truman years. The plan was majestic. It contemplated two huge new dams on the Colorado River in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Both had been carefully situated so as not to flood the park itself—except for what the Bureau called “minor” flooding that would drown lower Havasu Creek, the canyon’s most beautiful side stream, and submerge Lava Falls, the river’s most thunderous rapid. But the park would sit inside a dam sandwich: Bridge Canyon Dam would back up water for ninety-three miles below it, entirely flooding the bottom of Grand Canyon National Monument, and Marble Gorge Dam would create a reservoir more than forty miles long right above it. The dams had one purpose—hydroelectric power—and a single objective: lots and lots of cash. They would not conserve any water, because there was none left to conserve; in some years, they would cause a net
loss
to the river through evaporation. They were there only to take advantage of the thousand feet of elevation loss between Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. Together, they would generate 2.1 million kilowatts of peaking power, marketable at premium rates. Later, the power revenues would finance an artificial river of rescue; for now it would pay for the other features of the plan.

One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles. That city and its burgeoning suburbs would thus receive a huge surge of high-quality water from northern California to replace the salty Colorado. The San Joaquin Valley would siphon off a considerable portion along the way; it was going to be rescued, for the
third
time, from its suicidal habit of mining groundwater. New Mexico would get Hooker Dam, which would inundate yet another scenic monument—the Gila Wilderness—and Utah would get two more projects. In the middle of the list, camouflaged under “water salvage and recovery programs,” was the most expensive item of all: the Central Arizona Project. It was the same multibillion-dollar shell game that the United Western Investigation had proposed: new water from northern California would take care of southern California’s needs so that the Colorado could be conserved for the upper basin and Arizona.

Curiously, the United Western Investigation did not even rate a passing mention in the report, though it dwelled at some length on earlier plans to solve the Southwest’s water dilemma. Evidently, the UWI was still so closely associated with a raid on the Columbia River that the framers of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan would rather have pretended that it never existed. Another name hard to find in the report was that of the Interior Secretary, Stewart Udall. There were three possible explanations for this. One—the one conservationists wanted to believe—was that the plan did not really have Udall’s support. He was, after all, being described by them as the best Interior Secretary since Harold Ickes. How could the best Interior Secretary since Harold Ickes wish to inundate the most stunning feature of the American landscape? How could he talk about the “minor” intrusion of a reservoir into a national park? Another explanation was that Udall, as a native of Arizona, felt that he had to distance himself from a plan whose ultimate purpose was to deliver a couple of million acre-feet to his home state. A third explanation—the one conservationists least wanted to believe—was that Udall supported the plan but didn’t want to admit it.

The most interesting curiosity about the plan, however, was the obvious discrepancy between the amount of new water the Trinity River could deliver and the looming shortfall in the Colorado River. At the moment the plan was released, the second-largest reservoir in California, Clair Engle Lake, was beginning to fill on the upper reaches of the Trinity. Its capacity of 2,448,000 acre-feet was not much less than the river’s annual flow of 3,958,000 acre-feet. Clair Engle Lake was a main feature of the Central Valley Project; its water, therefore, was exclusively for California’s use. According to the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, only 1.2 million acre-feet would be left in the Trinity to augment the Colorado River—and that was assuming the Trinity, one of the world’s great salmon and steelhead rivers, would be bled virtually dry before reaching the sea. But the shortfall which the Bureau was projecting in the Colorado Basin, privately if not publicly, was at least 2.5 million acre-feet. Where would the other 1.3 million acre-feet come from? The Pacific Northwest Water Plan said nothing about it. It only hinted that it “does not provide an overall solution for the region’s water needs,” then failed to mention what such an ultimate solution would be. The Bureau’s maps had other reservoirs all over the place, drawn in gray—several on the Eel River, one on Cache Creek, the huge Ah Pah reservoir on the Klamath—but referred to these as “alternative storage possibilities,” as if they might substitute for, but not augment, the Trinity dams. Where, then, was water for six million people to come from?

In the Pacific Northwest, there was a lot of suspicion that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was merely a smokescreen for a much larger plan, long a gleam in the Colorado Basin’s eye, to tap the Columbia River. Such paranoia was inflamed by occasional speeches delivered to sympathetic ears by some of the Bureau’s engineers, insisting that this was the final solution that would someday have to be built to allow continued growth in the parching Southwest. Officially, however, the Interior Department went to great lengths to reassure the Northwest that it had no such designs. Udall publicly scoffed at the notion of diverting the Columbia, and Floyd Dominy, the Bureau commissioner, sharply reprimanded his underlings if they even mentioned the idea. But the truth of the matter was that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was a smokescreen. The Columbia was on Udall’s and Dominy’s minds the entire time.

On December 15, 1964, less than a year after the Pacific Southwest plan was revealed, a four-hour-long meeting quietly took place at the regal new offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (Built on a hill at one end of Sunset Boulevard, the MWD headquarters had a splendid view of the immense sprawl and traffic congestion it had helped create—four freeways converged right below its windows—but it was walled off from same by a forest of fountains and, fittingly, a moat.) The participants in the meeting were Udall, Dominy, Interior solicitor Edward Weinberg, Los Angeles Congressman Chet Holifeld (whose twin passions were water diversion and nuclear power), and seven carefully selected members of the MWD. Officially, this was a meeting that never took place, but as the chairman of the MWD, Joe Jensen, enthused in a “Confidential Report to MWD Directors,” it was “one of the most constructive conferences we have attended.” Udall, he reported, “expects to discuss with Senator Jackson of Washington a feasibility study and the eventual taking of ten to fifteen million acre-feet of water from the Columbia River. He would hope to have Senator Jackson lead off with the statement that the export program would be possible according to such guidelines as Jackson felt necessary for such an export program.”

“Mr. Dominy,” Jensen continued, “explained that a group in Denver had been working for thirty days on a preliminary study to bring water from the Columbia River, and that by March he should be able to give a definite answer as to the route and the general features of the project; as well as a comparison of cost of this project and the cost of delivering water from California and desalting.... Washington may need a stepped-up reclamation program,” Jensen quoted Dominy as saying, “in order to offset the adverse effects of closing down several federal installations in that state.”

“The Secretary stated two courses appeared to be possible at the present time,” Jensen wrote his fellow board members. “(1) Have a study made and defer action on authorization while the study is done right; (2) Introduce a bill which would authorize the import program, Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams, Central Arizona Project, and a few of the other projects. By March more definite information should be available and it should be possible to have the Committee report a bill to authorize the study and authorize the construction of the import program.... Dominy indicated the first six months of any presidential term was the best time to hit Congress.
He stated that the Bureau had never had any trouble getting funds once a project had been authorized,
but it frequently had trouble getting projects authorized” (emphasis added).

Udall and Dominy, in other words, wanted to study the feasibility of the Columbia diversion
after
it was already authorized, on the assumption that even if it wasn’t economically sound, it would be too late to stop it. Their real concern seemed to be lining up the political firepower that would let them succeed. And the plan, as Jensen described it, included so many gifts to so many states that it certainly
ought
to succeed. It contemplated numerous new irrigation projects in both Oregon and Nevada, some more projects in the upper Colorado Basin, and the stepped-up reclamation program in Washington that would make up for the mysterious “facilities” that might have to be shut down. Even then, Jensen said, “up to 7.5 million acre-feet of [Columbia River] water” would still reach Lake Mead every year. The plan, then, had to be far more expensive and ambitious than anything ever contemplated—more so, by far, than the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, more so even than the Klamath Diversion studied by the Bureau twelve years earlier. That was remarkable enough. What was
really
remarkable, however, was that the water would be available
“at the present price of Colorado River water.”

To charge no more for Colorado River water delivered to Los Angeles or Arizona than was being charged for water from nearby Hoover Dam would be a feat as astonishing as Moses’ bifurcation of the Red Sea. The water would have to come a thousand miles by aqueduct; Hoover water came only a couple of hundred miles, and the immense power output of the dam subsidized the big pump lift to L.A. Hoover Dam was financed with Depression-era interest rates and built by workers earning $4 a day; this project would be financed by Vietnam-era interest rates and built by unionized labor earning at least $6 an hour. There would be little, if any, hydroelectric power produced, but a lot of power might be required for pumping; the water had to go over or through two major mountain ranges! The difference in cost, per acre-foot, ought to be at least 800 percent, probably much more. But, according to Joe Jensen, Stewart Udall was offering it at the same price the MWD paid for water from Lake Mead. Somewhere, there was an immense subsidizing engine, but where?

In his memorandum, Jensen merely hinted at an answer; it may have sounded so good he didn’t believe it himself. “The cost of such Colorado River supply,” he wrote, “is to be paid out of the first power revenues. The remaining power revenues would be available for assisting in the payment of the main program or project, and water revenues would pay part of the cost.” Apparently, Jensen was promised by Udall and Dominy that the power revenues generated by the dams that would be part of the import scheme were going to subsidize the price of water before they even began to pay back the cost of the facilities! Before the dams were paid for; before the aqueducts were paid for; before the tunnels were paid for; before the siphons and canals were paid for—before a penny went to all of that, the power revenues were going to go directly into the pockets of water consumers in southern and central California and Arizona, subsidizing the price of their water. How else
could
Udall be promising the Southwest water—water that probably wouldn’t be available until the 1980s—at 1935 prices? If this was what it took to get the Central Arizona Project built—and Jensen, a leading foe of that project, did not say an unkind word about it in his memorandum—Udall and Dominy were just about prepared to give the water away.