Nature Noir (28 page)

I
F FOR DECADES
we park rangers risked our skins to make the American River canyons safe for river lovers to visit, it was the river lovers who kept them from going underwater, and who finally brought a symbolic end to the Auburn Dam with the same earth-moving machinery and concrete that had been used to partially build it. Here is how that happened.

In the late 1960s, when the Bureau had begun work on the dam and Placer County's Middle Fork dams had just been completed upstream, a tunnel nearly three miles long was blasted from the dam site on the American River to the next drainage north, Auburn Ravine. Had the Auburn Dam been finished, the Placer County Water Agency could have released stored snowmelt from their Middle Fork dams into the Auburn Reservoir and withdrawn it again through this tunnel, by gravity, to supply the western edge of the county with its water.

Three decades later, the mouth of the Auburn Ravine Tunnel—which by then should have been four hundred feet beneath the Auburn Reservoir—was still high and dry on the canyon wall in the dam site, two hundred feet above the river. Meanwhile Placer County's population had tripled, much of that along the county's western edge. To fulfill its obligations under a contract made with the county's water agency back when Auburn Dam was a certainty, the Bureau had been installing a temporary pump station and pipeline from the American River up the canyon wall to the mouth of the Auburn Ravine Tunnel every summer. Every fall the agency would disassemble the whole affair and move it to high ground, because the pumps had to be located where the river entered the diversion tunnel around the dam's foundations, and the shape of the canyon there made the pumps and pipeline vulnerable to being swept away by high water in the winter. This was costing the federal government between a quarter million and, on at least one occasion, one million dollars a year.

Over time this situation made strange bedfellows. Even with the temporary pumps, Placer County was getting less than a third of its annual rights to American River water at the dam site. For its part, the Bureau wanted an end to the Sisyphean task of constructing and disassembling the pump station and pipeline. Until such a time as the Auburn Dam's political fortunes got better, the way out for the Bureau was to close the diversion tunnel, restore the river to its course through the dam site, and install a permanent pump station in what was now the dry part of the riverbed, where the canyon's shape would put the pumps out of reach of high water. And environmental groups had long seen restoration of the river through the dam site as the victory they wanted over the Bureau and its dam.

In 1995 the Bureau quietly began working on plans to do what everyone wanted. But by 1998 the project ran afoul of Congressman John Doolittle, now chair of the Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources and a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Doolittle saw the restoration of the river through the dam site the same way the conservationists did—as a symbolic end to the Auburn Dam—and he didn't want any part of it. In his position of power over the Bureau's budget he demanded that the Bureau redesign the project to put the pumps somewhere upstream, leaving the diversion tunnel and other completed work on the Auburn Dam intact. However, if the Bureau did this, the project would lose the support of environmentalists.

***

A book such as this can contain only the highlights of such a long and convoluted story as the Auburn Dam's, in which two generations of conservationists fought two generations of developers, politicians, and dam engineers, and enough studies and reports were published to fill a medium-sized library. But to sketch that story's resolution, I must mention just a few of the environmentalists who had a part in saving the American River, and to do so should not be seen as diminishing the contributions of others.

Gary Estes is a slight, quiet, conservative-looking man who favors slacks and button-down sport shirts in muted designs. He has a degree in political science and the remnants of a soft Virginia accent. His professorial appearance and speech belie his blue-collar origins. His father was a ship fitter at the Norfolk Island Naval Shipyard.

Estes's résumé is a strange one. He is probably one of those people with a very high IQ who can easily become bored with the mundane quality of everyday work in most fields. By the time his restless intelligence found the Auburn Dam, he had already been a schoolteacher, a self-taught engineer specializing in heating and cooling of office buildings, the administrator of an energy users' group, an activist in energy issues, and a paralegal. In 1989 Estes and his wife moved to Auburn and Estes became his own general contractor, constructing a house for himself and his wife on the rim of the North Fork canyon near the dam site. By the time he finished the house he'd become interested in the dam. His wife had become used to being the breadwinner while Estes was building, and she now offered to support them while Estes devoted himself to his wide-ranging avocations. Estes is the first to admit that makes him a lucky guy.

In his new time off, Estes decided to teach himself geology and seismology in order to review a mountain of technical literature on earthquake hazards at the Auburn Dam site. He then prepared a treatise on the subject to accompany a presentation to the Auburn City Council. In his presentation, Estes pointed out that constructing the Auburn Dam to prevent Sacramento floods merely shifted disaster risk from the people of Sacramento to the people of Auburn, who lived next to the faults along which the Auburn Dam's filling might trigger a devastating earthquake. However speculative, it was an interesting point.

During the same period Estes was reading advanced meteorology, climatology, and river hydrology in order to study the kind of storms that caused floods on the American River. Estes thought it might be possible to recognize these storms as they formed over the Pacific (as Bill Mork and his colleagues had in 1986) and then convince the Bureau and the Army Corps of Engineers to act on those predictions (which did not occur in 1986) by dumping water from Folsom Dam to accommodate the predicted inflow. This, he reasoned, might eliminate the need for an Auburn Dam—at least where the dam's flood control aspects were concerned. In 1994 Estes coauthored a scholarly paper on the subject with a local college professor and then founded an annual conference at which to present it. A decade later the California Extreme Precipitation Symposium continues to attract top experts in weather, climatology, and flood control from all over the country, and Estes is still its principal organizer and moderator. The symposium has been credited with fostering an exchange of ideas on ways of using weather forecasting and storm modeling to better operate dozens of flood control reservoirs throughout California.

By this time Estes had joined a tiny and virtually penniless Auburn anti-dam group calling itself Protect American River Canyons (PARC). He soon became PARC's resident technical wonk. His trespasser's intellect gave him an ability to digest voluminous reports in other people's disciplines, and his lack of steady employment made him reliable about showing up at public meetings. In May 1997 Estes and fellow PARC activists attended a meeting at which the Bureau made a presentation on its plans to restore the river at the Auburn Dam site. Estes left feeling excited. But two years later, with Doolittle's redesign under way and the tripartite support for the project in danger of losing one of its legs, the project had slowed to a crawl.

Estes the former paralegal now took up lawyering. Poking around in law libraries for something with which to dislodge Doolittle, Estes discovered the public trust doctrine. Simply stated, the doctrine dictated that no one had a right to keep the public from using a navigable waterway without demonstrating just cause or exigency. Estes reasoned that the American River was navigable by kayak and raft, but by virtue of the danger that whitewater boaters could be sucked into the diversion tunnel and drowned, the portion of the river through the dam site had been closed to them for thirty years. Yet no dam had been built to justify that exclusion. Bingo, thought Estes.

Protect American River Canyons' larger ally in the fight against Auburn Dam was the Sacramento environmental group Friends of the River. FOR employed a man by the name of Ron Stork. With his short, curly gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and button-down oxford cloth shirts, Stork looked less like an environmentalist than an aide to Doolittle or some other Republican legislator. By the early nineties he was well known as one of the deadliest weapons in the environmentalists' arsenal against dams. Stork shared Estes's facility with facts, figures, and technical language; he was a good public speaker and strategic political thinker; he was single and without children; and he was possessed of a mighty work ethic that often kept him late at the office. In 1992 Stork spent four months camped out in a Washington, D.C., home converted, with seven cots and a couple of couches, into a dormitory for environmental lobbyists. From there he and his fellow campers walked back and forth on Constitution Avenue to petition Congress successfully to defeat that year's Auburn Dam bill. He did the same thing again in 1996, and this time, for a few weeks, Estes joined him. The two men became friends. Always humble, Estes thought of Stork as the
über
Estes.

At the center of PARC were two tall, lanky men: Eric Peach and Frank Olrich. Peach had an upholstery shop in Auburn, and he was so tall he had to build a platform on which to put the chairs he reupholstered, so he wouldn't have to bend over. Olrich, an education consultant, had been a high school basketball star in Auburn. By 1998 Estes was discussing public trust doctrine with Olrich and Stork. The three had quietly begun consulting experts preparatory to suing the Bureau to force the latter to restore the river. Their first consultation was with a Sacramento lawyer who was an expert in the public trust doctrine. Encouraged by this meeting, Olrich placed a secret call to a Bureau official in Colorado for advice. The Bureau man's hobby happened to be kayaking, and the two men had become friends when they met while running a river in the Rockies.

"Off the record," the Bureau official told Olrich during this call, "you should sue us for access to the dam site under the public trust doctrine. You'll probably win."

At this point PARC and FOR suffered setbacks. First they couldn't come up with money to mount a major environmental lawsuit. Then, in the winter of 1999, Olrich died while crosscountry skiing with his wife. Making their way through deep snow in the mountains east of Auburn, they attempted to cross the transmountain railroad tracks by climbing through the deep trough left by the trains' snowplows. Olrich was unable to climb out in time to avoid being struck by a freight train. His wife survived.

The funeral was held on a cold, windy February day at the old cemetery above the railroad tracks in Auburn. A Native American shaman chanted over an open mahogany coffin in which Olrich's mangled remains had been covered with a mixture of cedar shavings and dried flowers. Dark-eyed juncos and white-crowned sparrows flocked through the graveyard around the mourners huddled in their overcoats and mountain parkas, as if coming to pay their last respects. The ceremony stopped briefly when a Union Pacific freight like the one that had killed Olrich thundered up the valley, drowning out the eulogy.

Meanwhile a new Democratic administration had taken over the California governorship. Searching for a deeper pocket to back their effort, Stork and Estes approached the state attorney general's office to see if it might want to be a party to a lawsuit; after all, the dam site was a state recreation area. "Yes," said their contact at the AG's office. "We're interested. Let's have a meeting."

When Stork and Estes walked into that meeting, they were astounded to have the very lawyer they'd been consulting on public trust doctrine introduced to them as the new acting chief of the attorney general's environmental law branch. Within weeks the Bureau of Reclamation received a letter from the attorney general saying the state had decided to sue if the Bureau didn't move forward with restoring the river through the dam site and allowing the public to use it. The Bureau's lawyers evidently thought the state could win, so the process was set in motion to put the river back in its course.

For a while John Doolittle continued to blockade any federal legislation to improve flood control for Sacramento that wasn't an Auburn dam. But eventually, with no dam in sight, he came to an agreement with Sacramento congressman Robert Matsui to back improvements to levees in Sacramento and modifications to Folsom Dam, which would give the city protection from any flood large enough to have less than a one in two hundred chance of occurring in any given year.

By 2003 the Auburn Dam site resounded with the roar of earth-moving equipment as contractors took down remaining portions of the cofferdam, prepared to close the diversion tunnel, and began installing a manmade rapid with cemented-in boulders and a complex system of manifolds to pull Placer County's water out of the river without sucking up kayakers, protected fish, or the huge cargo of rock and mud the river carries at high water—a feat of engineering that, as far as anyone knew, had never been done anywhere in the world. Stork and Estes were as ecstatic as such quiet, studious men ever get. Some members of PARC had been suggesting that State Parks name the restored stretch of river the Frank Olrich Confluence Parkway. So far State Parks has not said it will do it. But it is safe to say that in the short run the future looks bright for the American River.

***

The river's long-range future is less certain. By 2000 an eminent panel of experts from government and top universities reported that the complex human-caused climatologic changes for which the term "global warming" had for some time been an inadequate handle was well under way. Most other studies concurred.

Among the effects forecast for California by the 2000 study was a generalized increase in total precipitation; others disagreed, saying California would become dryer. But there is general consensus that warming temperatures will raise the altitude at which rain becomes snow on the mountains, and as a result more precipitation will fall as rain and run off immediately, instead of sitting in the snow pack and percolating off the mountains during the spring months. Further, studies agree that winter rains will arrive less reliably, and that as the weather's heat engine revs up, there will be an increase in warm, high-energy events like the Pineapple Express storm of 1986. If the second half of the twentieth century is any indicator this may be true; these storms seemed to grow larger between 1955 and 1997. Such storms would raise rivers to flood stage more often, and the floodwaters would have to make their way to the sea through a Central Valley with ever greater population and property values. Turning from the question of floods to that of water supply, a diminished snow pack melting earlier in the year and more precipitation running off as rain would give agriculture, cities, and industry a smaller annual period during which to gather their water, so they may demand more space in which to store it. Environmentalists hope that groundwater storage may to some extent offset the need for more dams.