Cadillac Desert (68 page)

In California, when the issue is water, the ironies seem to string out in seamless succession. Bill Warne, the man who built the California Water Project, was in government service nearly all his life, and never made a great deal of money. In his mid-seventies, Warne was still doing consulting work; he also owned a small almond orchard outside of Sacramento. The consulting work was lucrative, but unpredictable. The almonds, on the other hand, were a good, reliable source of income. Or they were until Tenneco, by far the largest almond grower in the state, made a bid in 1981 to control the market—the same kind of power play that Prudential made with olives. “The bastards really went for our throats,” Warne admitted ruefully during an interview early in 1982. “They beat the hell out of the rest of us in the market, and that includes me.” Of course, one could just as well have said that Warne beat the hell out of himself. It was
his
project that irrigated Tenneco’s almond orchards; it was
his
aqueduct that flowed practically within view of his small almond ranch, destined for the huge factory farms in the desolate southern reaches of the valley. Because of the hot climate down there, the crops grown on irrigation water have always been, in large part, specialty crops: almonds, pistachios, grapes, olives, kiwis, melons, canning tomatoes. And because the national acreage given over to such crops is comparatively small (California accounts for most of it), a single big grower who doesn’t mind being a little ruthless can whiphand the market pretty much as he pleases.

Bill Warne’s project had become a Frankenstein’s monster. But its maker still refused to turn against his creation. “The moment we began settling California, we overran our water supply,” he said. “We’ve never gotten to the point where you could just stop. And we never will.”

Whether or not that is true, it is hard to imagine, by 1985, how the State Water Project would ever be completed. The old war-horses, the Bill Warnes and Pat Browns, might still be talking about the “unconscionable waste” of water flooding down the Eel River each winter (as Warne did, to whoever would listen), or saying that “the Columbia doesn’t need all that water that flows down there—it’s ridiculous, between you and me” (as Pat Brown did during an interview in 1979), but those who followed them in public office and were faced with the nitty-gritty problem of diverting the Eel, or the Columbia, or any so-called “surplus” water that could be found, discovered that it was like uncovering a nest of killer bees. Jerry Brown’s successor, George Deukmejian, was elected with large infusions of cash from the growers in the San Joaquin Valley, where he is from. As expected, Deukmejian, a deeply conservative Republican, proved himself ideologically double-jointed on the issue of water development; while wading through the state budget with a machete, he made a wide circle around the Peripheral Canal, which he wanted to build but call something else, and he spoke approvingly of plans to send a lot more water southward. The reaction from northern California politicians, who, in the meantime, had managed to seize control of the speaker’s chair in the legislature, and, through Congressman George Miller (who represents the Delta) of a key committee in Congress that can probably thwart much of what Deukmejian hopes to build, was so intemperate that the governor, after a year in office, was hardly mentioning the canal anymore.

Deukmejian may merely have decided to lie low, but by 1985 the people who will feel the impending shortages most acutely—the growers and the cities of the South Coast—appeared to have given up on the idea; either that, or they were mollifying their opposition while they stealthily plotted some hydrologic equivalent of Pearl Harbor. In June, the State Water Contractors, an organization representing all the customers of the State Water Project, issued a report predicting a shortfall, by the year 2010, of 4.9 million acre-feet state-wide—the domestic consumption of twenty million people. The deficit within the State Project service area alone would be about 1.9 million acre-feet. Without more construction, the San Joaquin Valley would receive 733,000 fewer acre-feet than it was counting on. The South Coast cities and irrigation districts, which signed contracts to buy 2,497,500 acre-feet from the State Water Project, could be guaranteed a firm yield of only 1,120,000 acre-feet. Only in wet years could each region hope for more; during extended droughts they would receive even less. Meanwhile, a state report on groundwater pumping was describing the overdraft as “potentially critical” in eleven subregions of the Central Valley, most of which were in the service area of the State Water Project. What made things worse was that the valley’s ancient saltwater aquifer, lying below the fresh water, could eventually rise to take its place.

Those figures, if they were accurate, bespoke calamity from both regions’ points of view. What was startling, therefore, was the fact that the report said virtually nothing about sending more water from northern California southward. Its solutions—which it admitted were only halfway solutions—were for the most part the same ones that had been proposed by the environmental lobby, and which the water lobby had scorned just a few years earlier. The Imperial Valley farmers, according to the report, could conserve about 250,000 acre-feet if they lined their earthen canals and improved their irrigation practices; the water could then be sold to Los Angeles. The occasional surplus Colorado River flows below Parker Dam, as long as they lasted, could be stored in groundwater basins near Los Angeles and San Diego. Reusing treated sewage water (the report didn’t go so far as to advocate drinking it) could save a few tens of thousands of acre-feet. Delta channels could be widened and levees rebuilt to allow slightly greater flows. The state could buy the surplus water in the Central Valley Project, for as long as that lasted. It was nickel-and-dime stuff, no heroics; the water savings might amount to 1.6 million acre-feet, which would only make up a third of the projected statewide shortfall. Only two new reservoirs, both off-stream and judiciously located south of San Francisco, were even mentioned, and the report didn’t even advocate that they be built; it merely called for “investigations.” (Initial investigations by the Department of Water Resources suggested a per-acre-foot price range of $310 to $400 from one of the reservoirs, Los Banos Grande; since that was fifteen to twenty times the cost of Oroville water, it was hard to imagine who in his right mind would buy it, at least as long as there was groundwater to overdraft.) Not a word was said about the Peripheral Canal.

Ironically, the State Water Contractors’ report was accompanied by a rather lengthy history of the State Water Project, written by the first head of the Department of Water Resources, Harvey Banks, which called the project “a high water mark symbolizing the results of the collective efforts of people of many points of view to resolve their ward with a program of statewide benefit.” Reviewing the history of the project, it was hard for some to see how Banks managed to arrive at such a conclusion. To begin with, Californians had been sold a pig in a poke: a project whose cost was deliberately and extravagantly understated, and whose delivery capability was much less than they had been led to believe. Completing just the first phase of construction had required federal cost-sharing at San Luis Dam, nearly half a billion dollars in tidelands oil subsidies, and several hundred million dollars in scavenged new revenue bonds. Then, when spectacular agricultural and urban growth had occurred on the promise of water the project couldn’t deliver, a new leadership of “new age” politicians had tried to sell the voters an even bigger and more expensive pig, which they had spurned. Los Angeles had fought with the growers, then formed an alliance with them, then fought again, then formed another alliance; two of the biggest growers had been instrumental in launching the project, then played an indispensable role in the defeat of the Peripheral Canal; and, all the while, the state had remained bitterly divided along the geographic and climatologic lines the project was supposed to supersede. This was “cooperation”?

As for the “statewide benefit” Banks wrote about, the California Water Project may have been necessary if the state was to continue to grow at its historical, breathtaking rate. But that was the point. The growth it created was not “orderly” growth, to use that buzzword of which the water developers are so fond. It was giantism. It was chaotic growth. In southern California, project water is allowing hundreds of acres to be subdivided, mailed, and paved over each week, transforming what could have been a Mediterranean paradise into one of the twentieth century’s urban nightmares. In Kern County, it created, solidified, and enriched land monopolies that are waging economic war against the small farmers who are so important to the state’s economic stability, and who give its agricultural regions what little charm they have. To drive from east to west across the San Joaquin Valley, from a pretty little palm-colonnaded city such as Chowchilla, made prosperous by the Central Valley Project and surrounding small farms, to a shabby town such as Huron, surrounded by endless tracts of irrigated land farmed by distant corporate owners, is to fathom the sorry social impact agricultural monopoly can have.

And what is worse, the State Water Project fostered growth in the desert, willy-nilly, without a secure foundation of water. Twenty million people may live between Santa Barbara and San Diego in 2010; the current outlook, according to the State Water Contractors, is that five million of them won’t have water unless some drastic conservation steps are taken and occasional surpluses are scavenged from every available source. Even if the groundwater overdraft in the San Joaquin Valley continues to increase—and the chairman of the California Water Commission said recently that it may become “intolerable” by the year 2000—a shortfall of nearly a million acre-feet looms ahead there. The likeliest “solution” to the shortages, as things now stand, will be a lot of land going out of production. The farmers who are apt to give up first are those who are wholly dependent on farming for their livelihood. The ones likely to continue are those to whom farming is a sideline to oil refining or banking or running a railroad, or a tax writeoff—a way to accumulate a little judicious financial loss.

W
hen Pat Brown’s two terms as governor were over, he opened a lucrative law practice in Beverly Hills. One of his firm’s most important clients became the Berrenda Mesa Water District, where the lands of several of the biggest corporate growers are located. The Blackwell Land Company, for example, owns 16,000 acres within Berrenda Mesa and co-owns 4600 more; Getty and Shell both farm thousands of acres there; one company, Mendiburu Land and Cattle, controls some 250,000 acres statewide. Thanks to his beloved Oroville Dam and the Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct—it was finally given that name by his son, in 1982—he had an opportunity to build up a tidy nest egg for his retirement.

But in his later years Pat Brown remained unrepentant about his firm’s client relationships, which some might have considered unseemly, and he was as proud of his project as ever. Another thing that hadn’t changed about him, curiously, was his candor. During his interviews for the Bancroft Library’s Oral History Program, he allowed himself some final thoughts about the meaning of the State Water Project in California’s history. “This project was a godsend to the big landowners of the state of California,” he confessed to Malca Chall. “It really increased the value of their property tremendously.... But also the ordinary citizen has been helped by it, too.” When his interviewer asked if enriching the big landowners of the state at public expense was really the result he had in mind, Brown responded, “It was the extreme liberals who wanted to break up the big farms in the state of California. They felt that the device of the delivery of water would do it. I was never convinced that the small farmer could succeed or would be good for the economy of the state and I don’t know today as I talk to you whether that’s true or not.”

Having said that, Brown suggested another motive that had made him, a northern Californian by birth, want so badly to build a project which would send a lot of northern California’s water southward: “Some of my advisers came to me and said, ‘Now governor, don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water. That’s a desert down there. Ecologically, it can’t sustain the number of people that will come if you bring the water project in there.’

“I weighed this very, very thoughtfully before I started going all out for the water project. Some of my advisers said to me, ‘Yes, but people are going to come to southern California anyway.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, send them up to northern California.’ I knew I wouldn’t be governor forever. I didn’t think I’d ever come down to southern California and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want all these people to go to northern California.’ ”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Those Who Refuse to Learn ...

E
arly in September of 1965, the Bureau of Reclamation’s newest dam, Fontenelle, on the Green River in southwestern Wyoming, sprang a leak. A big leak.

Eighteen years later, Pat Dugan remembered it as vividly as if it had been yesterday. Dugan was then regional director in Denver; he was the person who held the keys to the Bureau’s airplane. “Barney Bellport, the chief engineer, called me up at four A.M.,” Dugan remembers. “He said, ‘We’ve got to get that plane in the air quick. We’ve got a dam that’s about to go.’ Barney was a self-confident guy—a little bit of an arrogant bastard—so I figured if
he
was worried, we were in plenty of trouble. We were.”

Fontenelle was an earthen dam of moderate size on a troublesome site; it stored water for the Seedskadie Project. That the site had geologic problems was apparent from the very beginning, but the Bureau, as it would in a number of cases, built it anyway, for the simple reason that it was running out of good places to erect its dams. “I think I was the first person who ever did up a detailed cross section of that site,” Dugan remembers. “I didn’t like it from the beginning. The left abutment was fine, but for some reason we had a lot of trouble with the right one. It was shaly and just generally lousy. I figured it would take a lot of grout.” Asked what he thought of the Seedskadie Project itself, Dugan said, “It was one of the few lemons we could find in Wyoming that didn’t make your mouth pucker completely shut.”