Cadillac Desert (78 page)

The Woodward-Clyde study was interesting in other respects, for it went on to examine the other questions that were being raised about the Narrows. It concluded that “a safe dam can be built at the Narrows site,” but, as Kuiper pointedly noted, declined to say at what cost. In stark contrast to the conclusions of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it said that the project “would have no adverse effect on sandhill cranes.” And even though, fifty miles away, the Badger and Beaver irrigation districts were pioneering an alternative to on-stream and off-stream reservoirs, groundwater storage, it concluded that groundwater storage was “not an economically feasible” alternative to the Narrows.

Nothing was more striking, however, than its conclusion that the Bureau’s claimed benefits for recreation “remain valid”—even though “primary production biomass in the reservoir will exceed levels that are usually indicative of eutrophy.” In that remarkable juxtaposition of irreconcilable conclusions, Woodward-Clyde was tacitly agreeing with the Environmental Protection Agency, which was convinced that Narrows Reservoir, touted by the Bureau as a fine new recreational “lake,” would quickly turn into a fetid, grossly polluted agricultural sump. Betwen the partially treated sewage of nearly two million people, the untreated runoff of hundreds of thousands of cows (some of them defecating right in the river), and pesticides and fertilizers washing in from thousand and thousands of acres of intensively farmed land—between this, and the fact that the reservoir would be shallow and warm, with an evaporation rate of four feet a year, the water quality was going to be absolutely awful. The EPA was suggesting that it would not be fit for
contact,
which meant no swimming or water skiing without a waterproof covering over every inch of one’s body. Woodward-Clyde seemed to agree—it said biomass would
exceed
the levels that produce eutrophication, which is when a body of water begins turning into an algae pool. But it also agreed, implicitly if not explicitly, with the Bureau and Dick Lamm when they said that this aspiring swamp was destined to become the most popular reservoir in the entire state.

If one believed the brochure of the Lower South Platte Conservancy District, as many people would be drawn to fetid, shallow, bath-warm Lake Narrows as are drawn to Yellowstone National Park.

Here was a dam that the state engineer said would deliver only a third of the water it promised and could conceivably collapse; a project whose official cost estimate—if what two officials of the Union Pacific had privately suggested was correct—would barely suffice to relocate twenty-six miles of railroad track; a project whose real cost, whatever it turned out to be, would therefore be written off, in substantial measure, to “recreation,” though the water would be unsafe to touch; a project whose prevailing interest rate (crucial to justifying the whole scheme) was one-fifth the rates banks were charging in the late 1970s; a project many of whose beneficiaries owned more land than the law permitted in order to receive subsidized water (even
after
the acreage limit was stretched to 960 acres in 1982); a project that might, if the state engineer was correct, seep enough water to turn the town of Fort Morgan into a marsh; a project that would pile more debt onto the Bureau’s Missouri Basin Account; a project that would generate not a single kilowatt of hydroelectric power and would be all but worthless for flood control.

And yet, on top of all this, there was to be still another development, one that ought to have finished off the Narrows Project once and for all: Most
of the farmers who were supposed to be the beneficiaries said they didn’t want the water.

The farmers, it turned out, were not as ingenuous as the Bureau wished them to be. During the years it had pushed for the Narrows Project, the Bureau had never quoted them a firm price for the water nor guaranteed them a fixed amount. Why, in that case, should they obligate themselves to buy it for the next forty years?

In a letter to the Denver Post, Jacob Korman, the president of the Irrigationists’ Association, Water District Number One—the preexisting water district over which the Lower South Platte Conservancy District was trying to impose itself as a superagency—explained the farmers’ position. “There are fifteen irrigation districts in our association from Kersey near Greeley to Balzac below Brush,” Korman wrote. “If built, the dam would be in the heart of our district. These ditch companies provide irrigation water to 125,000 acres of land. Twelve of these ditch companies representing farmers irrigating 105,350 acres have taken positions
opposing
the Narrows. One, representing 1,100 acres, has indicated support. At the last report, two, involving 19,100 acres, have taken no position.”

Although many of the ditch companies in his district were initially enthusiastic about the project, Korman said, “those which have been offered specific contracts by the Lower South Platte Conservation District have found these contracts to be unacceptable.” The main reason was that the contracts demanded that the farmers pay for water released
at the dam.
The Bureau refused to guarantee delivery of the water at the farmers’ headgates—as if to demonstrate that it knew all along that Kuiper’s theory about channel losses was correct. The farmers might be a trusting lot, but they weren’t dumb.

“The office of our state engineer,” Korman concluded, “is the only office ... which has both the data and the technical staff to make a professional assessment as to what the real impact of the Narrows would be on providing water for irrigated agriculture in northeastern Colorado .... Actually, most of the ditch companies in the association feel ... that the unadjudicated water which we need to supplement our reservoirs and decreed waters
would in all probability be lost if Narrows were built”
(emphasis added).

That a majority of the farmers for whose benefit Narrows was to be constructed finally decided they would
lose
more water than they would gain from the dam was fascinating. The “unadjudicated” water of which Korman spoke were those high flows which, after every Colorado farmer had taken his water right and Nebraska had been guaranteed its share, the farmers could skim off for themselves. As of now, no one “owned” these occasional surpluses in the river; anyone could divert them for storage in offstream reservoirs or in the aquifer beneath his farm. But with Narrows Dam in place, all but the most extraordinary high flows—the fifty-year floods—would be captured and they would belong to the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau would charge money for them—charge even if it refused to guarantee that the water would ever arrive. The Bureau wasn’t even offering the farmers a pig in a poke; it was offering them a poke without a pig.

In 1982, at the behest of Senator Gary Hart, Woodward-Clyde did yet another study of the Narrows problem—it was now a “problem” as often as it was a “project”—and reversed its earlier conclusions as innocently as if they had never been held. Its estimate of water available for annual delivery was now down from more than eighty thousand acre-feet to thirty-four thousand acre-feet, almost in line with Kuiper’s estimate and fathoms below the Bureau’s. The effects on the sandhill and whooping cranes and other migratory wildlife downstream were now regarded as “moderately negative” instead of insignificant. But the most startling reversal came when the firm recalculated the worthiness of the project in simple economic terms. Using an interest rate of 7½ percent, but retaining the doubtful flood-control benefit of $800,000 a year and a highly optimistic view of the recreational potential, Woodward-Clyde came up with a benefit-cost ratio of only .10 to 1.0—for every dollar invested,
ten cents
would be returned. Even with an interest rate of 3¾ percent, Narrows was a loser.

Like most water projects, though, Narrows refused to roll over and die. In 1983, Congress, at the urging of local Representative Hank Brown, voted it another $475,000 appropriation. It wasn’t enough to build anything, but it was enough to keep it alive. The latest unofficial cost estimates, in 1984, were in the neighborhood of $500 million. If they are correct, each acre-foot (assuming 34,000 acre-feet is the annual yield) will cost $14,500 to develop. Few Colorado farmers can afford to pay more than $50 an acre-foot for water, and the Bureau has never charged any of its client farmers half that much (most get it for $7.50 or less). The taxpayers, presumably, will make up the difference, buying a couple of hundred farmers about the most expensive water on earth.

And yet, in early 1984, the politicians who had always been for the Narrows were still for it. Senator Gary Hart, a neoliberal, was for it; liberal Congressman Tim Wirth was not against it; Senator Bill Armstrong, a budget-conscious conservative Republican, supported it. But no one was for it as much as Dick Lamm—although Dick Lamm was the one politician honest enough to admit, discreetly, that it wasn’t worth building. Once, at a Denver Broncos football game, Karen Christenson’s sister and her husband found themselves sitting a few seats away from the governor, sporting their big, bright “Stop the Narrows” buttons. Lamm noticed the buttons, came over, and asked who they were. Then, in an odd small burst of candor, the intense young forward-thinking governor delivered himself of a private opinion about the project he had championed so relentlessly. “I know Narrows isn’t the best project in the world. I’d much rather use the money to build up the state’s economy in a more efficient way. But when Washington offers you that kind of economic impetus, a governor can’t just turn it down.”

Repeating the story, Don Christenson mused, “If that’s the way they run a railroad, then this country hasn’t got any hope.”

Meanwhile, in Denver, Clarence Kuiper had taken early retirement. “The Narrows thing got so annoying to me I couldn’t stand it, so I retired,” Kuiper says. “I’ve lived too long to put up with that sort of nonsense.” Early in 1984, he was no less convinced than ever that Narrows, if built, stood a respectable chance of collapsing like Teton—an issue that had become all but lost in the minutiae of the debate. “Unless they extend that grout curtain a hell of a lot farther than they plan to, they’re going to get seepage, just like they did at Teton. Seepage is one of the worst things that can happen to an earthfill dam. I’d rather have water going over the top in a waterfall than chewing away at my abutments. That’s still the number-one issue as far as I am concerned.”

Neither the Lamm administration nor the Bureau was ready to listen to Kuiper. Lamm, however, had finally found a way to get even. The firm with which Kuiper now serves as a consultant, the Harza Engineering Company of Chicago, was the other contender, with Woodward-Clyde, for the lucrative South Platte Basin Alternatives study in 1982. Because of Kuiper’s relationship with Harza, it didn’t get it. Suave Bill McDonald, who relieved the intemperate Felix Sparks of his command of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, put it right into his letter. Unless Harza dumped Kuiper as a consultant, it stood no chance of getting the contract. As far as Kuiper is concerned, he is being blackballed throughout the state. “They’ve stolen a man’s livelihood,” he says. “My pension isn’t enough to live on. I know this state as well as anyone, but they’ve made my name mud.”

If one were to put an epitaph on this story, one might do no better than to quote Glenn Saunders, the man who championed water development for fifty years in Colorado and then, in the end, came up against a project he wanted to kill—and couldn’t. As he readily admits, it changed his whole way of looking at things.

To Glenn Saunders, Narrows Dam was not so much a dam as a symbol of a senescent society seeking refuge in the past. “What that dam represents,” he said, “is, first of all, the fact that there are very few honest people in the world. Ninety-eight percent of humanity cannot admit when it’s made a mistake. This applies especially to politicians. A politician for some reason thinks it is political suicide to admit that he was wrong. Dick Lamm cannot bring himself to admit that he has been in error about Narrows. He has one of the finest minds in Colorado, his thinking on some subjects is some of the best thinking any politician in this age is capable of—but he cannot bring himself to say, ‘I was wrong on the Narrows Dam.’

“The Bureau is the same way,” Saunders went on. “It cannot admit when it has made a mistake. It has also run out of good projects. And on top of that it has all of these bizarre cash-register funds—the Missouri Basin Fund, which is behind the Narrows—that are supposed to make these projects self-financing. They do not, but no one understands that. The Bureau is like one of these crooks with money earning interest in twenty different banks—it has to spend the money on something. It is all
borrowed
money—it belongs to the people of the United States—but the people of the United States don’t know that. The whole thing is a machine, a perpetual-motion machine that keeps churning out dams, which the politicians and most westerners are reflexively in favor of, and the whole business is running the country into the ground.

“The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. ‘Our forefathers would have built these projects!’ they say. ‘They had vision!’ That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge unused bonanza they found here. One wave of immigrants after another could occupy new land, new land, new land. There was topsoil, water—there was gold, silver, and iron ore lying right on top of the earth. We picked our way through a ripe orchard and made it bare. The new generations are going to go down, down, down. With projects like the Narrows, we’re trying to pretend that things are as they always were. ‘Let’s just go out and find some money and build a dam and we’ll all be richer and better off.’ We’ve been so busy spending money and reaping the fruits that we’re blind to the fact that there are no more fruits. By trying to make things better, we’re making them worse and worse.”