Cadillac Desert (76 page)

“It isn’t just Lamm,” Merson went on disgustedly. “The whole Congressional delegation, except for Pat Schroeder”—a young Democratic Congresswoman from Denver—“is on the run from the irrigators—not even all the irrigators, but just those who are lucky enough to be sucking off the big federal teat. Gary Hart, Floyd Haskell, Tim Wirth—I like them all, they’re my friends, but they’re all scared to death of not liking water enough. This state is booming like crazy, and we’re running out of water. So politicians tend to go blind in office. They’re for any water project—they don’t care how bad it is.

“At EPA, we tried to start a permit program for salinity discharges,” Merson went on. “Some of these irrigators are poisoning rivers all the way to the ocean, returning water that’s twenty times saltier than when they take it out. I explained it to Dick and he said, ‘You’re right. It’s a good plan. But I can’t support it. The legislature will kill me over it. Goddamn it, this could be another Interstate 470. I’ll lose!’ That was what really bothered him,” Merson said, “ ‘I’ll lose!’ I took it to Harris Sherman and he said, ‘It’s unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral—
and
it will hurt agriculture.’ ”

Agriculture was key in Lamm’s and Sherman’s thinking, because what they wanted even more than growth was
stable
growth. In 125 years, Colorado’s economy has boomed and busted more than that of any other state except, perhaps, Nevada. Nevada had introduced stable industries: gambling, prostitution, marriage, divorce. In Colorado, the only industry that had filled the fearful troughs between the boom cycles, when it looked as if the state might be virtually abandoned, was agriculture. It represented stability. Late in the twentieth century, it had also come to represent something else. Unlike eastern states, which can keep out development only by passing laws, western states have a natural means of halting industries they don’t want at their gates: a scarcity of water. In the early 1970s, Colorado became the first western state that actually wanted to keep an industry out, or at least keep it from overwhelming its economy and way of life. The industry was energy—especially oil shale. And the means of holding back its growth was to try to put the remaining water in agriculture’s hands and let the energy companies worry about wresting it away—or let them import water from somewhere else, as Exxon was proposing to run an aqueduct from Oahe Reservoir in South Dakota.

C. J. Kuiper, on the other hand, was charged with putting water to beneficial use, and it seemed silly to him to waste tens of thousands of acre-feet on crops with a low economic return—crops which were subsidized by the Reclamation program and, in the case of some, federal price supports—when half of America’s oil was now coming out of the Middle East. Privately, Kuiper believed oil shale development was necessary: philosophically, he believed in the doctrine of highest use. Water had become so scarce in Colorado that whoever could pay the most should get what remained. Reclamation farmers paid the least of anyone.

Such thinking, however, was ultimately to have very little to do with the position Kuiper took on the Narrows Project. His position rested on his growing conviction that Narrows, if built, wouldn’t even be able to
hold
water; that it would never be able to deliver the water it promised; and that there was a very real possibility the dam would collapse.

Never, since Narrows was first authorized in 1944, had anyone suggested that it might sit on an unsafe site. How much on-site testing the Bureau did prior to the 1970s is unknown; its main concern seemed to be drumming up enough local support to overwhelm the oppositon. But by 1976 it had its first sizable appropriation in hand, and finally decided it ought to learn something about the geology of the Narrows site.

One morning in the summer of that year, Corky Tomky, a neighbor of Don Christenson’s and a leader in the battle against the dam, noticed that the Bureau had a man with a drilling rig down by the South Platte. Tomky wandered over to say hello. The man announced that he was drilling core samples to see what the foundation of the dam was like. Tomky asked him what he had found so far.

“Well, don’t quote me,” the driller answered, “but this site has big problems.”

“Big problems?”

“Big
problems. There’s bedrock down there somewhere, but I can’t find it. I’ve drilled two hundred and fifty feet down and still haven’t hit it. All I get is gravel and loose rock, and sand.”

“What do you suppose that means?” Tomky asked.

“It means,” the Bureau man drawled, “that this dam is going to have a hell of a time holding water. The foundation is like a coffee filter. But don’t tell ’em I told you that.”

Tomky swore that he wouldn’t, then he walked casually back to his truck and gunned it over the bumpy road toward Don Cristenson’s place.

“As soon as Corky told me what he heard,” Christenson recalled, “we called up our Congressman, Jim Johnson. He was one hundred percent for the dam, but we figured
this
was a piece of news. We got his assistant on the line—I can’t even remember what his name is. Well, he sounded real concerned on the phone. He told me, ‘I’ll talk to the Congressman and get right back to you.’ I wished I’d had a tape recorder on that damn line. He never got back to me. No, sir. And the next day, wouldn’t you believe it, that well driller was
not
back on the job. They handcuffed him to a desk in Denver somewhere. He never came back again. It was about then,” Christenson said, “that we decided to see the state engineer.”

The point at which Christenson decided to pay a call on the state engineer coincided nicely with the collapse of Teton Dam. Teton, as Kuiper put it, “scared the living bleep out of Lamm and Harris Sherman.” Both of them watched poor Cecil Andrus face the reporters on the news, and saw his hapless water-resources director, Keith Higginson, blamed for a tragedy he had had little to do with. Andrus had been lukewarm at most about the Teton Project. What if a dam Lamm and Sherman strongly backed wiped out a string of Colorado towns? After Teton Dam went, Sherman decided he had better review the safety questions surrounding any imminent project planned for Colorado.

“When Sherman called his meeting, I was just leaving on a trip,” Kuiper recalls. “I had never paid much attention to the Narrows—I’m not required to in the case of a federal project. I knew the ancient Platte River left a great big alluvial bed and that the Bureau would have to get through a lot of alluvial wash to anchor the dam on anyting solid. But I figured they knew what to do. I could have walked into Sherman’s meeting and said, ‘Well, I know of a few problems with the site but I defer to the Bureau’s expertise.’ After
Teton
—good Lord, I didn’t imagine that the Bureau was going to let something
that
stupid happen again.” But, Kuiper figured, he was the state engineer; if a dam failed, and he had assayed the site, he would share in the blame no matter who deserved it. Besides, Sherman had asked for his opinion, and he might as well give an informed one. Therefore, as he left to go on his trip, he asked his assistants, in his absence, to prepare a schematic of the Narrows site, superimposing the dam over a big color diagram of what was known of the geologic conditions. When he got back he had only a few minutes to look over the schematic; a few minutes was all he needed. “I looked at that schematic,” Kuiper said, “and in thirty seconds I saw why that test driller was right. The old alluvial bed of that ancient river is huge. There are about ten stories of gravel out there sitting on five stories of cobblestones. Way off on the south end of the site the alluvial bed is almost three hundred feet deep. Well, they can’t clean all that stuff out—it would be much too expensive and God knows where they’d even put it. So they were just going to let the dam sit on top of the alluvium, not really anchored to rock except at the abutments. And the alluvium ran
under
the south abutment. To prevent seepage under the dam, they had a cutoff trench planned down to bedrock, sort of like the keyway trench they built at Teton. But basically they were just going to hang it under the dam like a curtain.

“Hell, that alluvium is so wide they’ve got to run that trench out on the south side, way beyond the dam, or water is going to creep around it—exactly the way it did at Teton. It looked to me, from the schematic, that they were going to have to extend it out a mile. Well, no way they were planning to do that—it would cost too much.

“I sat there staring at the schematic,” Kuiper said, “and I said to myself, ‘Here we go again. Doesn’t the Bureau even know how to learn from a
disaster?’
”

Even if the seepage didn’t reenter the dam immediately—which was what apparently happened at Teton—Kuiper guessed that the rate of water seepage would be so enormous that the reservoir would more or less disappear and emerge somewhere downriver, as a swamp. But where? The water would back up behind the dam, penetrate the porous reservoir bottom, and sneak around the cutoff trench, underground. Then, following the downslope of the plains, it would have to resurface at about the same elevation. That elevation coincided approximately with the town of Fort Morgan, population eight thousand, which lay fifteen miles downriver. “If they build the dam,” Kuiper said sardonically, “those Fort Morganites had better learn how to swim.”

When Kuiper walked into Harris Sherman’s meeting, he was surprised to see his sometime nemesis Glenn Saunders smiling at him. Saunders had somehow caught wind of the gathering and had demanded admittance; Sherman, who could hardly have wanted him there, hadn’t dared bar him. One did not invite the antipathy of the preeminent lawyer in Colorado.

Sherman opened the meeting by asking each of the assembled members to state flatly whether they had any misgivings about the Narrows site.

“The site’s fine,” said the Bureau geologist.

“The site’s fine,” said Felix Sparks, the head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

“The site’s fine,” said the state geologist.

Everyone else had the same answer, except Kuiper.

“Well,” said Kuiper, “I might have agreed with you until ten minutes ago, when I saw the schematic my staff prepared for me. Maybe you should have a look at it, too.”

Sherman looked pained. “What are you saying, Kupe?” he demanded.

“I’m saying that looking at that schematic gave me some serious reservations about the Narrows site,” Kuiper said. “From the looks of it there could be major leakage right under the dam. If it were a nonfederal project, I’d never approve it.”

Sherman, watching Saunders and Don Christenson, whom the lawyer had brought with him, cackling silently behind closed lips, was incensed. “On what basis do you say that? Why do you say that?”

Kuiper then laid out what the schematic had told him. Sherman acted as if he hadn’t heard a word of it. “I don’t care about your schematic,” he finally interrupted. “I want to see a lengthy memo on all of this. You’ve made some very serious charges in the presence of two people who will obviously use them against this dam. You had better be right.”

Kuiper stood up to his full six feet six and glowered at Sherman, who was at least twenty-five years younger. “Young man, you’ll get your lengthy memorandum,” he growled. “But don’t you tell me what I’d ‘better’ be.” Then he stalked out of the room.

Kuiper had hardly finished his memorandum later that day when he received calls from both Saunders and the
Rocky Mountain
News, which had obviously been put onto the story by Saunders, asking whether they could have a copy. The
News
reporter also wanted to take a look through his Narrows file. As a public servant, Kuiper had no other choice than to keep his files open, except on matters involving national security. He was also legally obligated to make public any document he wrote, including the Sherman memo. He invited both Saunders and the reporter to come over. The reporter from the News was just taking the file to an empty desk when Sherman stalked into Kuiper’s office.

“What is
he
doing here?” Sherman demanded, pointing at the reporter.

Kuiper said he had given him permission to look through the file.

Sherman was aghast.
“I
haven’t even had a chance to look at it,” he protested.

“Well, he asked first,” said Kuiper. Sherman looked as if he were ready to throw a punch. He walked over to the reporter and grabbed the sheaf of files. “I’m looking through these first,” he said, plopping the stack on an empty desk as the reporter stood by dumbfounded.

In Kuiper, Sherman had a messenger whom he couldn’t kill, and when he tried he seemed only to wound himself. After the incident with the reporter, the state attorney general removed Kuiper’s Narrows file for safekeeping because of the lawsuit pending over the issue. Kuiper insists he did not ask him to do it, but Sherman evidently thought he had; the whole thing reflected badly on him, because it looked as if the attorney general thought someone might pilfer materials from the file, and the person who would have seemed to have the best motive—the person most ardently in favor of Narrows—was Sherman himself. Sherman was enraged. He immediately wrote Kuiper a long memorandum impugning, implicitly or explicitly, his integrity, his motives, his sense of judgment, and even his competence as an engineer. Because he was about to leave town, Sherman dictated the memo and asked his assistant, Jerry Sjaagstad, to sign it. After reading the memo, Kuiper sat down and wrote a blistering one of his own, which he walked downstairs and threw on Sjaagstad’s desk. Ten minutes later, Sjaagstad rushed into his offfice and demanded that he retract what he had said. Kuiper refused. When Sherman returned and heard what had happened,
he
came storming into Kuiper’s office.