Cadillac Desert (62 page)

Even if the farmers sensed that, ultimately, the government would cave in, the Reclamation law was at the very least a nuisance to the big growers in the CVP service area. And to many of the
really
big growers who owned huge acreages toward the southern end of the valley, between Fresno and Bakersfield, the Central Valley Project meant nothing at all. Nearly all of its water deliveries stopped at Fresno, and most of it went to the valley’s east side. The biggest owners were south of Fresno, and a number were on the west side, where they had amassed fiefdoms of dirt-cheap scrubland, which they were either irrigating or hoping to irrigate someday. Not a single substantial stream drains the lee side of the Coast Range south of San Francisco—precipitation is barely six inches a year—so most of the west-side growers were utterly dependent on groundwater. It was fossil water, water that had accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years but which, at the rate it was being pumped, evaporated, and transpired by plants, would barely last another fifty, if that.

The Central Valley Project was, in fact, to have an interesting—a startling—effect on the groundwater table of the San Joaquin Valley. In Tulare County, at one test well, the aquifer dropped sixty feet between 1920 and 1960, the year the first CVP water arrived. Thanks to the flood of new surface water, the water table then rose twenty feet in nine years. Just three years later, however, it had dropped another thirty-three feet. In Kern County, where the depth to groundwater is much greater, farmers who had pumped from 275 feet during World War II were pumping from 460 feet by 1965. The reason was obvious: the CVP and the Corps of Engineers projects on the Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern had delivered a lot of surface water throughout the valley, but they had encouraged so much agricultural expansion that they hadn’t really relieved the pressure on the aquifer at all. For a while things were better;
then the projects actually made things worse.
Half the agricultural water used in the state was still coming out of the ground—even farmers who got cheap federal water continued to pump from their own wells in order to irrigate as much land as possible—and with three times as much irrigated land in production as there had been thirty years before, the big projects, besides depriving San Francisco Bay of half of its historical outflow, were just encouraging more pumping.

If there were no controls over groundwater pumping, a lot of farming in the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley faced extinction. By the late 1950s, the land was producing the greatest agricultural bounty in the world. Four counties—Fresno County, Kings County, Kern County, Madera County—that were consistently among the six wealthiest agricultural counties in the nation now looked as if they might topple like a row of dominoes. The farmers were like addicts, oblivious to their self-destructive ways; they were making so much money they wouldn’t think of groundwater regulation, and any politician who so much as uttered the phrase was instantly marked as a threat. (A hand-picked Fresno legislator named Ken Maddy once referred to groundwater regulation as “World War III.”) The only answer, then, was to try once more to have the citizens of the nation’s richest state build them a huge project to bring in more water from somewhere else.

A Himalaya of obstacles, a series of seemingly insurmountable crests, stood between the San Joaquin Valley and its goal. Cities could afford to build dams and aqueducts, because urban water was at least ten times more valuable than irrigation water. And urban property was worth much more than agricultural land—the richest acre of valley land couldn’t be traded for a ten-by-ten-hundred plot in Beverly Hills—so a big urban aqueduct would have billions in assessed valuation standing behind its bonds. But without the fabulous subsidies written into the Reclamation Act—the “ability to pay” clause, the exemption from interest, the hydropower profits shoveled right back to the farmers—few irrigation projects could be built anywhere. The only feasible ones were at perfect sites—where a first-class river with a first-class gunsight canyon lay right above some first-class irrigable land. If one had to build a huge dam on a middling river or an aqueduct hundreds of miles long, or if the water had to be pumped uphill, any nonfederal project was out of the question.

Unfortunately, the San Joaquin Valley had every one of those problems. Much of the land in need of rescue was second- or third-class, even fifth-class, with vast depths to groundwater or drainage problems or alkaline deposits in the soil. Some of the barren acreage held for speculative purposes by oil companies at the southern extremity of the valley had no usable groundwater at all. The big rivers were all in the north, so an aqueduct hundreds of miles long would have to be built. And since the San Joaquin Valley slopes imperceptibly upward as one travels south, most of the land lay several hundred feet above sea level. The water would have to go to sea level in order to cross the Delta, in the middle of the state; then it would have to be pumped three to five hundred feet uphill.

One thing was clear: the growers, rich as they were, could never finance such a project themselves, as cooperative irrigation districts had financed a few smaller projects on the east side. The state would have to build it. But California had become highly urbanized since World War II; the votes had shifted toward the cities on the coast. Those urban voters would be crucial in getting the project through the legislature. In fact, they would probably demand a public referendum, and a referendum cannot be bought as easily as an act of legislation. The urban voters would obviously have to subsidize the growers, too. Between the astronomical cost of building such a project
and
the cost of pumping the water uphill, the farmers could never afford it—not as long as CVP water was being sold to farmers next door for $3.50 an acre-foot. Not as long as their cotton-farming competitors in Georgia and Texas and Louisiana (cotton was the main crop in the southern San Joaquin) got their water free from the sky. And that meant only one thing: urban Californians would have to get some of the water. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t vote for the project.

Only one major city could logically be tied into the project, and that was Los Angeles. Water on its way from northern California to Los Angeles would, of course, pass right through the San Joaquin Valley. With its meager and erratic rainfall, Los Angeles had always been haunted by drought; the thought of more water always set off a Pavlovian response. On the other hand, the metropolitan region didn’t really
need
the water. The city of Los Angeles proper was getting virtually all its needs fulfilled by its Owens River Aqueduct, and its countless suburbs, together with San Diego, had recently gotten the first of their 550,000-acre-foot entitlement from the Colorado River. By the early 1950s, Los Angeles was extending its aqueduct into Mono Basin, where it planned to divert the streams tumbling out of Yosemite that feed Mono Lake. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District, the areawide water imperium serving most of southern California, was already planning a second aqueduct to the Colorado River, which would double that supply. (This was water that southern California planned to “borrow” from Arizona’s entitlement for as long as Arizona—stymied by southern California’s Congressional delegation—was unable to build the Central Arizona Project.) Six million new people could settle in southern California before a water famine developed.

What made matters worse was that in order to deliver northern California water to Los Angeles, you would have to contend with the Tehachapi Mountains, which separate southern California from the San Joaquin Valley. Either you had to tunnel through that brutish, barren summit, or you had to pump the water up and over, two-thirds of a vertical mile. Since the Tehachapis sit on two major active earthquake faults, the Garlock and the San Andreas, tunneling would be risky. An earthquake could crush the aqueduct inside the mountains and shut off the water for months or years. That meant you would have to pump the water uphill, and the energy requirements would simply be awesome.

Why, then, would Los Angeles, which had most of its water arriving entirely by gravity from the Owens River, and the rest of the South Coast region, which got its water pumped by subsidized electricity from Hoover Dam, vote for a project that would sell them expensive water they wouldn’t need for decades?

There were two possible reasons. One was Arizona’s lawsuit against California over its Colorado River entitlement. If California lost, and the Central Arizona Project was built, southern California would have to forfeit a vast quantity of water, on whose promise much of its expected growth was based—water enough for three million people. With such stakes, its smug confidence that it would win the lawsuit had to be at least
somewhat
shaky.

The other reason southern California might go along was simply that opportunities to find water did not arise every year. Ten or twenty years would be required to complete the project; by the time it was finished, if the region continued its spellbinding growth, there would be millions of new people there. Los Angeles was growing so fast that it might not want to pass up
any
opportunity to find more water—whether it made good sense or not.

If one thought about it this way, and thought about it long enough, it all began to seem inevitable. Los Angeles would resist, it would drag its feet and fret, but once the project began to roll through the legislature it would climb aboard. Since southern California was, financially speaking, the key to the whole plan, it simply
had
to be dragged along. Southern California would sign on—out of fear, out of simple ignorance if nothing else. And southern Californians would get some of the water. But not too much.

During the winter of 1955, California was hit by the biggest floods since the monumental deluges of 1861 and 1862. After weeks of almost continuous rain, the rivers of the Sierra Nevada and the North Coast were tumultuous. The Eel River in the coastal mountains, which nearly dries up during the late summer and fall, was carrying the flow of the Yukon, the St. Lawrence, and the Missouri combined. The flood that spilled out of the mouth of the Eel—550,000 cubic feet per second—could have driven a fleet of battleships to Japan. The Sacramento River, despite the enormous bulk of Shasta Dam in its path, also rose to monstrous heights. But it was the Feather River, the Sacramento’s main tributary in the northern Sierra, that was the killer.

At the end of December, as a series of huge, slow-moving cloud-masses wrung themselves out against the western wall of the range, the Feather River rose with hurricane suddenness. Swelling toward a crest of 250,000 cubic feet per second, it burst out of its canyon and flooded over Yuba City and Marysville, two small cities on the floodplain below, near the confluence with the Sacramento. Within hours, a parade of houses, some wrecked and some nearly intact, was floating toward San Francisco. Yuba City was substantially destroyed, first by water and then by mud. More than twenty people died.

The San Joaquin growers would never have admitted to feeling relief, but the Marysville and Yuba City disaster was the best news they had heard in years. If there had to be floods, the Feather River’s wrath was a serendipitous one, for it had already been chosen as their river of rescue.

The origins of the rescue project went back to the Bureau of Reclamation’s United Western Investigation, the two-year study of transcontinental water-diversion schemes, completed in 1951, that had been the swan song of Commissioner Mike Straus. Having looked at the possibility of diverting the Columbia, the Snake, and all the larger rivers of the Northwest to the desert Southwest, the Bureau had settled on the Klamath, which it wanted to run in reverse, through a sixty-mile tunnel, back into the Sacramento River and then south. The plan had collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, and the Eisenhower administration had administered the
coup de grâce
by firing Straus. But the idea of a transbasin water diversion had quickened the pulse of California’s state engineer, A. D. Edmonston, an unreconstructed, gung-ho, New Deal water-development type. In 1951, Edmonston, backed by the agricultural lobby, persuaded the legislature to give him enough money to undertake an “inventory” of the state’s water resources—where water was in surplus, where it might be needed. What emerged three years later was something else entirely. The “inventory” had metamorphosed into something called the California Water Plan—a scheme for moving water southward that virtually duplicated the Bureau’s plan. Only two things were different. There would be no Martian aqueduct leading from the Klamath River to Lake Mead; the remote Klamath was, in fact, out of the picture, replaced by the smaller but much more accessible Feather River. The other distinction was that the plan, as envisioned by Edmonston, would not be a federal project in any sense. It did not come right out and say so (perhaps because it hoped to get some federal help), but if one read between the lines, the state, or at least Edmonston, was now contemplating something this monumental on its own, just as it had originally planned the CVP. In fact, no sooner was the California Water Plan released than a new agency, the Department of Water Resources, was created out of a jumble of fifty-two agencies that had previously dealt with water, and given administrative powers to match.

Edmonston’s scheme was mesmerizing. The largest water project ever built by a state or local government was New York City’s Delaware water system, completed during World War II. The Delaware Aqueduct was eighty-five miles long and entirely underground—by far the longest hard-rock tunnel in the world. But the California Water Plan, in its first phase alone, contemplated the movement of four times more water over a distance six times as long. What was even more startling was that most of the water would go to irrigation. The Delaware Aqueduct had left New York, a Babylon of wealth, up to its ears in debt. But since each average household paid around a hundred dollars an acre-foot for water, and because the city had a huge commercial and industrial sector sharing the cost, the bonds would be paid off unless the city, for some reason, saw its growth curve go drastically into reverse. In the mid-1950s, the most that irrigation farmers could pay for water was, by a generous average, about $15 an acre-foot—less than a fifth as much as New Yorkers paid. And New York City’s water arrived by gravity; California’s farmers would have to pay for several hundred vertical feet of pumping, and Los Angeles would have to buy water pumped more than three thousand feet if the aqueduct went over instead of through the Tehachapi Mountains. (The United Western Investigation had already concluded that tunneling was too risky because of earthquake hazards.) How could anyone afford it?