Cadillac Desert (86 page)

Wilson Dam, Tennessee River, Tennessee. Capacity in 1928: 687,000 acre-feet. Capacity in 1961: 641,000 acre-feet.

Clouse Lake, Center Branch of Rush Creek, Ohio. Capacity in 1948: 234 acre-feet. Capacity in 1970: 142 acre-feet.

In thirty-five years, Lake Mead was filled with more acre-feet of silt than 98 percent of the reservoirs in the United States are filling with acre-feet of water. The rate has slowed considerably since 1963, because the silt is now building up behind Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Glen Canyon dams.

The Bureau of Reclamation has an Office of Sedimentation, which was being run in 1984 by a cheerful fellow named Bob Strand. One wonders whether his good cheer stems from the fact that sedimentation is the one problem the Bureau hasn’t really been forced to deal with yet. “All of our bigger reservoirs were built with a sedimentation allowance,” says Strand. “There’s enough surplus capacity in them to permit most of the projects to operate according to plan over their payout lifetime. In most cases that’s fifty to a hundred years. After that, silt will begin to cut into capacity. It hasn’t happened yet to any significant degree.” What will the Bureau do when it does happen? “We’re working on it,” says Strand.

“The dams are wasting assets,” says Rafael Kazmann, a retired professor of hydrology from Louisiana State University and one of the world’s foremost authorities on water. “When they silt up, that’s it.” Can’t the mud be removed somehow? “Sure,” says Kazmann, “but where are you going to put it? It will wash right back in unless you truck it out to sea. The cost of removing it is so prohibitive anyway that I can’t imagine it being done. Do you understand how many coal trains it would take to haul away the Colorado River’s annual production of silt? How would you get it out of the canyons? You can design dams to flush out the silts nearest to the dam, but all you get rid of is a narrow profile. You create a little short canyon in a vast plateau of mud. Most of the stuff stays no matter what you do.”

The one place with some experience at desilting dams is Los Angeles, which has built a number of flood debris reservoirs around the basin whose capacity it can ill afford to lose. Between 1967 and 1977, the Metropolitan Water District and the Department of Water and Power removed 23.7 million cubic yards of mud from behind those dams. The cost was $29.1 million. At that rate, it would cost more than a billion and a half dollars, in modern money, to remove the silt that accumulated in Lake Mead over thirty years—if one could find any place to put it.

“The average politician,” says Luna Leopold, another hydrologist who seems to have some appreciation of the magnitude of the problem, “has a time horizon of around four years. The agencies are tuned to Congress, so theirs is about the same. No one has begun to think about this yet. But keep in mind that thousands of big dams were built in this country during a very brief period—between 1915 and 1975. Many are going to be silting up at the same time. There already are some small reservoirs in the East that are mud up to the gunwales. These are little manageable reservoirs—nothing like the big canyon reservoirs we’ve built in the West. But I haven’t heard of anything being done about them.”

The silt that is now accumulating behind the dams used to settle near the mouths of the rivers. The Mississippi-Atchafalaya Delta, which is bigger than New Jersey, is made up entirely of silt from the West and Middle West. About half of the sediment that used to reach it every year no longer does. Rafael Kazmann, who made a career of studying the Delta and may understand it better than anyone else alive, is convinced that a third to half of it will disappear within the next few decades; a significant percentage already has. He also believes the Mississippi will change course—probably by the year 2000—and begin pouring down the Atchafalaya Basin, wiping out many miles of interstate highway and several of the nation’s largest gas pipelines. “The river has been straitjacketed and robbed of its silt,” says Kazmann. “It’s a much more powerfully scouring river that it was. It’s just a matter of time before it eats away one of its bends and seeks out a completely new course.” Kazmann also believes that, in an economic sense, such an event could be the greatest peacetime disaster in American history. The only thing that might eclipse it is the silting up of the dams.

“The answer I have always heard from bureaucrats,” says Kazmann, “is that scientific and technological progress has accelerated at such a tremendous rate that some solution will come along. I don’t know that they think—that we’re going to have fusion energy pumping out the dams? The only answer I can see is to make the dams higher or build new ones. Right now I can think of few places where it would make economic sense to do that, even if it were feasible.”

I
n his book
Modern Hydrology,
Rafael Kazmann has written:

[T]he reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the regime of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with minimum loss to the nation.... The forces involved ... are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide.... [I]t is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle....

EPILOGUE

A Civilization, if You Can Keep It

In May of 1958, while testifying at Senate hearings on the acreage provisions of the Reclamation Act, the then Associate Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, departed both from the issue at hand and from his prepared remarks to lecture some critical eastern Senators on what the federal irrigation program has meant to the American West.

“My people came here as farmers and settled in East Hampton, Long Island, in 1710,” Dominy began. “As the generations progressed they moved westward as public lands were opened up and as the West was developed, until my grandfather, Lafayette Dominy, in 1845, was born on a farm in LaSalle County, Illinois, carved from the wilderness by his own father and grandfather. When Lafayette Dominy reached maturity and married and had his first child, who was my father, he wanted a farm of his own but discovered that within his means he could not acquire one in Illinois.... He borrowed $2,000 from a preacher in 1876 and migrated with his small family to Nebraska and took one of the 160-acre homesteads about which we have been speaking.

“Now as to the adequacy of that homestead I would like to have you know that they lived in a sod house. They lived out beyond medical attention, without any of the modern facilities that we feel are desirable for all Americans today. They lost all the girl children in the family to diphtheria. The three male children survived, or else I would not be here.

“I want you to know that on that 160-acre homestead it took that man from 1876 to 1919 to pay off the $2,000 that he borrowed.... [W]hen my father reached maturity he took a homestead in the same area, 160 acres. On that farm six of us children were born and six of us reached maturity on the substance of that 160-acre homestead. We had outside plumbing. We did not have deep freezers, automobiles, school buses coming by the door. We walked to school in the mud. We maybe had one decent set of clothes to wear to town on Saturday....

“You take 160 acres that has to provide automobiles, modern school facilities, taxes for school buses, for good roads, to provide deep freezers, electric stoves, electric refrigerators, the modern conveniences that the farm housewife ought to have and deserves, it puts a much greater demand on the income of that land than was necessary to support us at a subsistence level, prevailing for my father or grandfather....

“[When] I became a county agricultural agent ... I saw the results of people who had decided ‘this is the Utopia for which we seek,’ and they had left Missouri and Iowa and other places where land was not available—they put their belongings in immigrant cars, and they went to Wyoming and Montana. They took out what was promised to them as an abundant chance for a great family living, 640 dryland acres. I want everyone in this room and I want this committee to know that most of those 640 acres could not sustain a family under any reasonable economic conditions that have prevailed then or now. I saw family after family, after devoting fifteen or twenty years of valiant effort ... forced to sell out and start anew.”

Considering all this, Dominy went on, how could you view the federal Reclamation program as anything less than the salvation of the West? The same 160 acres of flinty, stubbled, profoundly unwelcoming land that couldn’t support a family, couldn’t create a tax base, couldn’t provide even dietary subsistence during drought years was magically transformed when water was led to it. Could one imagine what the West would be like if there hadn’t been a Bureau of Reclamation? If the rivers hadn’t been turned out of their beds and allowed to remake that pitless landscape?

It is a question worth thinking about. Nevada is the one western state without any mentionable rivers at all, and perhaps the closest approximation of how things could have remained if the landscape had suffered no improvement: its settlements a hundred miles apart, its economy rooted, for lack of a better alternative, in what used to be called sin, its ghost towns as numerous as those that managed to survive. Of course, in the states with rivers there was plenty of irrigation going on before the Bureau arrived on the scene, but an appalling number of those private ventures were destined to collapse. There were, as Dominy said, tens of thousands of heart-rending farm failures, and catastrophic overgrazing on the dryland ranches; irrigation helped put an end to both. There were all those rivers just wasting water to the Gulf and Pacific; there was the virgin Colorado, as Dominy liked to say, “useless to anyone.” Did one prefer the tawdry mirage of Las Vegas to the palpable miracle of the Imperial Valley? Did one prefer a wild and feckless Colorado to one that measures out steady water and power to ten million people? Should we not have built Hoover Dam?

There are those who might say yes, who would argue that the West should have been left pretty much as it was. At the distant other end of the spectrum are the water developers and engineers who cannot rest while great rivers like the Yukon and the Fraser still run free, for whom life seems to hold little meaning except to subjugate nature, to improve it, to engage it in a contest of wills. For the rest of us, contemplating the modern West presents a dilemma. We mourn what has been lost since Lewis and Clark—the feast of wilderness, the mammoth herds of buffalo, the fifty thousand grizzly bears and the million antelope that roamed California, the coastal streams that one could cross on the backs of spawning salmon. On the other hand, to see a sudden unearthly swath of green amid the austere and mournful emptiness of the Mojave Desert or the Harney Basin is to watch one’s prejudices against mankind’s conquering instinct begin to dissolve. So we want to know, even if it seems an academic matter now, what it all amounts to that we have done out here in the West. How much was sensible? How much was right? Was it folly to allow places like Los Angeles and Phoenix to grow up? Were we insane or farsighted to build all the dams? And even if such questions seem academic, they lead to an emphatically practical one: What are we going to do next?

It isn’t easy to get people to think along these lines, at least not yet, because the vulnerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. Drive through Los Angeles and see the millions of lawns and the water flowing everywhere and the transformation seems immutable: everything rolls along nonstop like the seamless ribbons of traffic; it all seems permanent. But then catch a flight to Salt Lake City and fly over Glen Canyon Dam at thirty thousand feet, a height from which even this magnificent bulwark becomes a frail thumbnail holding back a monstrous, deceptively placid, man-made sea, and think what one sudden convulsion of the earth or one crude atomic bomb or one five-hundred-year flood (which came close to occurring in 1983 and nearly destroyed a spillway under the dam) might do to that fragile plug in its sandstone gorge, and what the sudden emptying of Lake Powell, with its eight and a half trillion gallons of water, would do to Hoover Dam downstream, and what the instantaneous disappearance of those huge life-sustaining lakes would mean to the thirteen million people hunkered down in southern California and to the Imperial Valley—which would no longer exist. But the West’s dependence on distant and easily disruptible dams and aqueducts is just the most palpable kind of vulnerability it now has to face. The more insidious forces—salt poisoning of the soil, groundwater mining, the inexorable transformation of the reservoirs from water to solid ground—are, in the long run, a worse threat. If Hoover and Glen Canyon dams were to collapse, they could be rebuilt; the cost would be only $15 billion or so. But to replace the groundwater being mined throughout the West would mean creating an entirely new Colorado River half again as large as the one that exists.

Like so many great and extravagant achievements, from the fountains of Rome to the federal deficit, the immense national dam-construction program that allowed civilization to flourish in the deserts of the West contains the seeds of disintegration; it is the old saw about an empire’s rising higher and higher and having farther and farther to fall. Without the federal government there would have been no Central Valley Project, and without that project California would never have amassed the wealth and creditworthiness to build its own State Water Project, which loosed a huge expansion of farming and urban development on the false promise of water that may never arrive. Without Uncle Sam masquerading from the 1930s to the 1970s as a godfather of limitless ambition and means, the seven Ogallala states might never have chosen to exhaust their groundwater as precipitously as they have; they let themselves be convinced that the government would rescue them when the water ran out, just as the Colorado Basin states foolishly persuaded themselves that Uncle Sam would “augment” their overappropriated river when it ran day. The government—the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers—first created a miraculous abundance of water, then sold it so cheaply that the mirage filled the horizon. Everywhere one turned, one saw water, cheap water, inexhaustible water, and when there were more virgin rivers and aquifiers to tap, the illusion was temporarily real. But now the desert is encroaching on the islands of green that have risen within it, and the once mighty Bureau seems helpless to keep its advance at bay; the government is broke, the cost of rescue is mind-boggling, and the rest of the country, its infrastructure in varying stages of collapse, thinks the West has already had too much of a good thing. So the West is finally being forced back onto solutions it should have tried decades ago: the cities are beginning to buy water from farmers; groundwater regulation is no longer equated with heavy-handed bolshevism. But to say that a new era has dawned is premature. Poll the rugged-individualist members of the Sacramento Rotary Club and a majority will say that their bankrupt government should by all means build them a $2.5 billion Auburn Dam.