In December of 1964, California was hit by floods that were even wilder than the great floods of 1955. In three days, from December 21 to 24, Blue Canyon on the American River recorded 20 inches of rain. All the rivers were roaring, from Big Sur to the Oregon border and beyond. But the river that rampaged most was the Eel.
The Eel rose 72 feet from its bed. It snapped bridges with surgical precision; it uprooted three- hundred-foot redwoods; it swept 50 million board feet of timber out to sea — driftwood which, for the most part, is still piled along California’s beaches. At Scotia, near its mouth, the Eel was carrying the Mississippi River in a garment bag; 765,000 cubic feet of water were going by each second. Every town along the river was damaged — some were never seen again. The high-water mark can still be seen along the Avenue of the Giants, displayed on a number of redwood trees. It is about three stories above the road.
The Christmas flood — the second “hundred-year’’ flood in just nine years — had Governor Pat Brown and his staff , and the Army Corps of Engineers issuing statements expressing profound dismay while they privately rubbed their hands with glee. Within months, the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Department of Water Resources had locked arms as the State-Federal Interagency Task Force, ready, once and for all, to choke California’s untamed rivers into submission. Every river on the North Coast, except the Smith and the Klamath, was to get at least one big dam; the various forks of the Eel were to get eight. But the Bureau and the Corps kept getting into scraps over who was to build what first, and Pat Brown’s term was running out, so, one by one, the dams fell into obscurity. By 1966, when Ronald Reagan became governor, the only dam in which strong interest was still being expressed was the largest, Dos Rios, on the Middle Fork of the Eel. With twice the storage capacity of Shasta Lake, Dos Rios was the ideal addition to the State Water Project; it could deliver another 900,000 acre-feet, almost enough to bring the total yield, in normal years, up to the 4,230,000 acre-feet the state had promised to deliver. The site was reasonably close to the Central Valley; all one had to do was dig a twenty-one-mile tunnel through the Yolla Bolly Mountains and dump the water into Stony Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento.
Dos Rios had three things going against it, though the Eel had acquired such a black reputation at that point that none seemed likely to prevent its being built. One was the fact that it would do nothing to control the Eel. During the Christmas flood, more than 500,000 cubic feet per second had poured out of the South and North forks and the main Eel, which would all remain undammed. What did it matter if one’s house was under twelve feet of water or eleven feet four inches? Those eight inches at Scotia were the sum total of the flood crest that Dos Rios would contain. A Round Valley rancher, Richard Wilson, who had a degree in agricultural engineering from Dartmouth, proved it, and the Corps could only wish him wrong.
Another drawback was that the reservoir would drown a large Indian reservation and the town of Covelo—population about two thousand at the time — but that sort of thing had been done many times before. (The Corps had included the flooding of the reservation in its benefit-cost analysis, but had it down as a benefit because the Indians would get a “nicer” town somewhere else.) The third drawback was that the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t particularly interested.
Reagan, as a westerner, should have been a friend of dams, but he was growing more conservative by the hour, and true conservatives tend to dislike great public works. He also distrusted the Corps of Engineers — a feeling which the Corps, if anything, seemed to reinforce. Reagan's resources secretary, Norman Livermore, remembers asking the Corps to do two cost-benefit analyses — one using the 3.25% interest rate which the Corps planned to use, the other using the 6.5% rate that reflected economic reality. “When they gave it to me,” remembers Livermore, “I looked at the two columns, and the bottom line was exactly the same. I took it into a cabinet meeting and really got a laugh.”
For four and a half years, Reagan stalled on Dos Rios while the water lobby was practically battering down his door. The head of his Department of Water Resources, Bill Gianelli, a short, square man with a Vince Lombardi temperament and an American flag perpetually stuck in his lapel, was, according to Richard Wilson — who was the leader of the ragtag opposition — an “absolute zealot” in favor of building the dam. So was Don Clausen, the Republican Congressman representing the North Coast. But Wilson was a friend of Norman Livermore’s, and Livermore had Reagan’s ear. According to Wilson, when the governor realized he finally had to say yes or no, he asked Livermore to give him every argument he could think of against the dam. When Livermore was finished, he emerged from Reagan’s office and almost fell into the arms of Don Clausen, who was waiting to give Reagan his arguments for the dam. Clausen was a voluble and persuasive man, but later he confided to his intimates what had really happened during the meeting. Halfway through it, Clausen said dispiritedly, the governor had fallen asleep.
Wilson insists he got the story from Livermore himself, though Livermore, still a Reagan loyalist in 1984, said he “‘couldn’t remember” it. Whatever the case, in 1969, Reagan finally announced that he would not support Dos Rios Dam. In the press release explaining his reasoning, he talked about costs, poor economics, the frailty of the flood-control rationale. Privately, though, Reagan was upset about flooding the Round Valley reservation. “We've broken enough treaties with the Indians already,” the old cowboy actor is reported to have said.
(Cadillac Desert, 1986)
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