Too Many Dams

There are those 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 50,000 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 30,000 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 500-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 13 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 via siltation —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 dry. 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 aquifers 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.