Cadillac Desert (89 page)

Because of its unprecedented destructiveness, and due to a natural reluctance on the part of Canadians to let go of so much water for the sake of their paternalistic and overambitious neighbors, the tours organized by the Wenatchee
Daily World
in the 1960s encountered pickets at every airstrip in the bush carrying signs that read WATER THIEVES BEWARE. By 1981, anti-NAWAPA sentiment in British Columbia had, if anything, intensified. Everyone seemed to have heard of it, and nearly everyone was against it—“nearly,” because here and there one finds someone who is for it, at least for some smaller version of it. Declining emphatically to be identified, a fairly well known professor at a major university said, “The thing is too big and destructive as is, but a smaller version is worth considering. Compared to the damage the loggers are inflicting on the coast, a few big new reservoirs and canals might appear harmless. The water is worth a lot of money to us, potentially. We wouldn’t have to go out and fell whole forests for income. Besides that, I think Canadians are being very narrow-minded about the whole thing. We depend on you for food, and why
shouldn’t
we help our neighbor when she is running out of water if we have far more than we can ever use?”

The logging of which the professor spoke is by far the largest source of income in the province of British Columbia, and is being conducted with a careless abandon that might make even the U.S. Forest Service wince. Logging is also a cyclical industry, expanding and contracting in rhythm with such imponderable forces as U.S. deficits and housing starts. Agriculture is more stable, and water could be sold through forty-year contracts like those of the Bureau of Reclamation, ensuring a steady, predictable income every year.

Derreck Sewall, who teaches at the University of Victoria and is widely acknowledged as the foremost authority on water in Canada, says that Canada has its own water shortages looming, particularly in the Okanagan region of southern British Columbia—western Canada’s fruitbasket—and on irrigated parts of the Alberta plains, where the farmers are overdrafting groundwater as determinedly as their American counterparts. For the foreseeable future, he sees no possibility of NAWAPA’s being built unless Canada itself broaches the idea. “There’s a xenophobic,
dirigiste
mood in this country today,” Sewall says. “Canadians feel like a colony of the U.S., which is in a certain sense justified. You own 95 percent of our oil industry, for example. So the mood is against exporting our most vital natural resource. But eventually Canada will approach the United States and say, ‘You want some of our water? O.K. Here’s the price to be paid. We’ll deal with you in realistic terms. Water will be part of an overall program of resource development and protection. You want our water, then don’t build the Garrison Diversion Project, or keep the return flows out of Lake Winnipeg. We’ll give you a certain amount of water for each certain percent reduction in acid rain.’ Canadians will eventually come to realize that, as far as the U.S. is concerned, water has a value far beyond that which prevails today. You could almost say that we’ve got you over a tub.”

So what, all things considered, are the odds that NAWAPA will be built?

“We’re going to solve the water problem through conservation,” says one venerable U.S. hydrologic engineer. “We’re not going to build any NAWAPA projects, even if the Canadians invite us in. The Bureau of Reclamation is going to have to start charging realistic rates for water and the farmers are going to live with them by saving a lot of water. We’re going to solve the energy problem with coal. I don’t know what we’re going to do about salinity—put it off into the future, probably. I don’t know if we’re even going to build any more big water projects in this country. The economics went sour forty years ago. A lot of irrigated land will go out of production and we’ll just watch it go out.”

“NAWAPA is the kind of thing you think about when you’re smoking pot,” says another. “People who say it will be built are crazy. Ralph Parsons himself told me he wasn’t really serious about it. He just needed the foundation as a tax dodge.”

“We won’t build the big NAWAPA,” says a third. “But I’d bet we’ll build a baby NAWAPA. No one knows how much money water will be worth in the future, but it’s going to be worth a lot. When we see we’re about to lose millions of acres of the most productive farmland in the country and thousands of towns are going to go bust, it will just be a tremendous shock. If we stop talking about water importation for a while, the Canadians will bring it up themselves.”

Recently the Soviet Union decided, after many years of planning, to shelve a scheme that would divert the Ob River, three-quarters the size of the Mississippi, from its northerly course into the Arctic Sea and send it fifteen hundred miles or so deep into the steppes of central Asia. A second diversion, which would shunt the Sukhona River into the Volga, has not yet been shelved, but remains in doubt. Together, the two projects are about as ambitious as a NAWAPA scheme built to two-fifths scale. As a result of the decision, the Aral Sea will continue to decline indefinitely at its current rate of eleven and a half feet per year, due to irrigation withdrawals. “Central Asia will simply have to get along with more rational use of its own resources,” said a group of Soviet water planners in an official statement. Then they added, “At least until the 21st century.”

On April 21, 1981, the premier of British Columbia, Bill Bennett, on a tour of California, gave a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Castigating those who wanted to stop building dams, Bennett told his audience that a way must be found to harness and preserve the fresh water pouring out of British Columbia to the ocean. “Dams are more than hydro,” he explained. “They preserve our greatest resource and control wild runoff.” A questioner then asked whether, since British Columbia at the moment had no plans to use the water Bennett wanted to “conserve” for anything other than hydroelectric power, his call for more dams meant that his government was considering the exportation of water to the United States. The answer was no, Bennett said firmly. Then he added, “But come and see me in twenty years.”

Shortly after Bennett’s speech, Canada was smacked particularly hard by the worldwide recession that followed in the wake of the Reagan economic policy. In British Columbia, the timber industry went moribund, and plans for several huge hydroelectric dams on the Peace, Liard, and Stikine rivers were indefinitely shelved. The provincial utility, B.C. Hydro, cut its staff force from 11,000 to 6,000, and unemployment went into double digits throughout the country. As a severely chastened Canada began crawling, slowly and unsteadily, out of the deepest economic morass it had seen since the Depression, one could detect a strikingly different attitude on the part of some of its prominent politicians toward a NAWAPA-style water-diversion scheme. Early in 1985, the leader of Quebec’s Liberal Party, Robert Bourassa, began to push an eastern Canadian version of NAWAPA, the GRAND Canal (for Great Replenishment and Northern Development Canal Concept), which would turn James Bay into a freshwater lake by constructing a tremendous dike across its northern side. The big rivers feeding the bay would pool below the dike, forming a freshwater reservoir nearly the size of Lake Ontario. The water would then be led by aqueduct into the Great Lakes, and from there, according to engineers from the Bechtel Corporation—which was spending a million dollars to study the plan—to the American high plains. The estimated cost would be $100 billion.

“On the whole I find more interest in the idea than opposition,” said Robert Bourassa.

“I view the prospect with enthusiasm,” said Brian Mulroney, Canada’s new Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, the people of northern Quebec—mainly Cree Indians—are seeing their culture disintegrate under the waters of monstrous reservoirs being erected by the $35 billion James Bay Hydroelectric Project, which is selling power—though not yet water—to the United States.

“I don’t think the people of the province would stand for it,” said Frank Miller, the premier of neighboring Ontario.

Afterword to the Revised Edition

I
n 1978, the year I moved to San Francisco to begin writing this book, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse rode off into a bowl of heat and dust and the Sixth flashed in on a flood. The previous water year—which, in California, runs from October to the following September—had been the driest since recordkeeping began; water year 1976 had been the third driest. But late in 1977 the skies miraculously opened, and water year 1978 ended up as one of the wettest on record. It was a first act. By February of 1979, spillways were roaring at dams whose reservoirs had almost gone dry two years before. In 1980, the third year in a row categorized as “very wet,” the jet stream, carrying storms like aircraft in a landing pattern at O’Hare, took aim at southern California, and for weeks the Los Angeles River was so swollen with runoff there was talk of building an aqueduct to send it north.

Then came the really big water years, the
El Nino
winters of 1982 and 1983. No one fully understands why the ocean warms during
El Niño
episodes—vast climatic oscillations are involved—and you can’t safely predict the result, but strong
El Niños
tend to coincide with heavy precipitation years. The early Eighties
El Niño
was the sharpest warming on record. The first huge storm hit the California coast just after Christmas in 1982. Winds over Mount Tamalpais, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, blew a hundred and ten miles an hour, and, after a truck tumbled onto its side, the bridge itself was closed for only the second time since it was built. The thousands of gouges, slumps, and landslide tracks that you see in the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay were mostly caused by that storm, which dumped more rain in an hour than parts of California ordinarily see in a year. During the following winter, superstorms such as this were routine. In the Sierra Nevada, the standing snowfall record of 750 inches, set in 1906, was eclipsed by fifteen feet. Yosemite Valley was underwater. The storms, bloated with subtropical moisture that seemed to be flash-evaporating from the ocean, were not wrung out, as they usually are, by the Sierra-Cascade blockade. Mirages in Nevada and Utah filled with real water; the Great Salt Lake flooded highways miles from its fleeing shore. The Colorado River at spring melt was unofficially gauged at 350,000 cubic feet per second; that was the flood that damaged the spillway directly under Glen Canyon Dam and—by washing in millions of cubic yards of silt—hastened Lake Powell’s ongoing metamorphosis from reservoir to farmland.

The
El Niño
episode played itself out by 1985, and the weather returned to normal for a year or two, until, on Valentine’s Day in 1986—just as this book first went to press—one of the three biggest California storms since the turn of the century decided to make landfall.

I was in a Santa Monica hotel room when the frontal system approached the coast. I awakened to a radio weatherman in midsentence, saying something about an electronic buoy a few dozen miles offshore that was sending in low-pressure readings such as you measure inside the eye of a hurricane. I scrapped my plans and decided to flee for home. The ocean below my window was all whitecaps and tremendous gunmetal-gray swells. Ocean Avenue was already a litter of palm fronds torn off the trees by flailing winds. My flight was one of the last to leave before the LAX tower radioed pilots to reroute or wait out the worst of it. Forty tons of flying machine felt like a hummingbird in a gale; a flight attendant tumbled across three rows of passengers when the aircraft fell down an elevator shaft. As we landed in San Francisco in horizontal sheets of rain, screams and prayers turned to tears of relief. A few of us went straight to an airport bar and, at two in the afternoon, got stone-drunk.

The storm series lasted, almost without interruption, for ten days, lending credibility to Noah’s flood. Central and northern California, where most of the big reservoirs are, were the hardest hit. I had always had a mordant wish to watch a dam collapse, and this seemed like the best opportunity I might get in my life. I arrived at Oroville Dam just as the storm was beginning to break up. (It took me hours longer than usual to get there, because shallow lakes had formed across Interstate 680, creating instant new refuges for mallards and pintails.) In the previous week and a half, the Feather River watershed at five thousand feet had unofficially recorded fifty-five inches of precipitation, most of it as rain, which melted several feet of snow lying on the ground. Tampa gets that much rain in an average year. The spillway at Oroville is a big concrete channel that loops around the right abutment of the immense earthen dam. It was dumping a hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of water per second, a couple of rivers the size of the Tennessee. That much water in that confined a space—the spillway is about as wide as a basketball court—is in a hurry-up mood. My guess is that it was moving thirty or forty miles per hour. Small trees and shrubs lining the spillway fence were bent double under the force of vortex winds created by so much mass in a rush. A crow, sailing arrogantly a few feet overhead, suddenly executed some frantic maneuvers to avoid being sucked in himself; he too had never seen anything like this before. Where the spillway poured the river back into the river below the dam—it didn’t so much pour in as fly in—a dense plume of mist mushroomed eighty stories high, split by three arching rainbows.

A dam did actually burst during the flood, though I didn’t see it happen. It was a temporary cofferdam built at the prospective site of Auburn Dam, whose construction had been mired in lawsuits and debate for years. The cofferdam held back about a hundred thousand acre-feet of water—thirty-two billion gallons—that merged, almost instantaneously, with a river already swollen to ten times its normal size. The flood-on-a-flood headed into Folsom Lake, which sits twenty miles above Sacramento and has a capacity of about a million acre-feet. Folsom Dam would have to spill the whole reservoir, 320 billion gallons of water, in three or four days in order to absorb the mythic flood pouring in. If it did not, the dam itself would be jeopardized, and if Folsom ended up like Teton Dam then a lot of Sacramento would float under the Golden Gate Bridge. When I arrived, a whole crowd of disaster buffs was already there, held at bay by dozens of highway patrol. I managed to sneak briefly onto the dam crest anyway; it trembled as a bank might tremble during a hurricane. The spillway at Folsom, a concrete and rock dam, was built into its center; it’s really a man-made, two-hundred-foot waterfall. At the time, it was dumping much more water than Niagara Falls. You couldn’t have heard a jet taking off five hundred feet away; that’s the kind of noise a million pounds of water makes—a million pounds a
second
—as it tumbles a couple of hundred feet and crashes into a canyon riverbed. (If Folsom was going to be destroyed, it would probably be a consequence of the falling river chewing out the bedrock on which the dam was built.) The waterfall reversed direction about eighty yards downriver and rose up in a towering, backfalling hydraulic wave that raced back and crashed into the dam’s downstream face, as if it wanted a second chance to knock it to smithereens. Rapids with big reversal waves are the kind that kayakers fear most, because you can be trapped forever in the churning backwash. In a reversal of such monstrous size, a kayaker would have had the free will of a toothpick. A group of boaters was standing near me, screaming at one another over the river’s roar; they were debating how long it would take before a trapped boater was ground down to individual molecules.