Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [102]
And it was built on a foundation of deception.
In 1931, the Corps of Engineers finally pronounced the construction of a concrete dam at Grand Coulee feasible. What the Corps had in mind, however, was a low dam, rising two or three hundred feet from bedrock—a dam similar to its own Bonneville Dam downstream, useful only for regulating navigation flows and for hydroelectricity. The Bureau, however, was not interested in a low dam. The pump lift from the reservoir surface to the canyon rim would be at least five hundred feet; such a lift was beyond the capacity of any pumps in existence at the time, and even if they had existed their enormous appetite for power would make any irrigation project infeasible in an economic sense. A high dam was absolutely necessary for an irrigation project, not only because it would knock twenty stories off the pump lift, but because it would produce a vast amount of surplus hydroelectricity to handle the still impressive pump lift and generate enough revenue to subsidize the cost of water so that the farmers could afford it.
The problem with a high dam, however, was Congress. Confronted on all sides by calamity and cries for relief, Congress was not about to appropriate $270 million (about twelve times more in today’s money) to build a white elephant of a dam in a remote corner of the country where hardly anyone lived. As it happened, however, Congress had undermined its own intention by giving FDR blanket authority, under the Public Works Administration and the National Industrial Recovery Act, to select and fund “emergency” projects that would assist the relief effort. Why not use some of that money to get started with a low dam—and then switch horses in midstream?
Nowhere is there absolute proof that this is the strategy FDR had in mind. The circumstantial evidence is merely overwhelming. In 1933, he designated $63 million, the greatest sum ever for any single purpose, from the Public Works Administration under Section 202 of the National Industrial Recovery Act to begin construction on a low dam at Grand Coulee. At that point, there was no question of intent; a low dam was specifically mentioned in the appropriation. A few months later, the construction contract for the dam was let to a consortium of engineering firms that went by the acronym MWAK. The contract also specified a low dam. The $63 million was spent in a hurry; by 1935, cofferdams were already in place and the permanent dam’s foundation was rising in the riverbed. It was not, however, a foundation for a low dam—it was the foundation of a high dam.
In interviews, no engineer who worked on Grand Coulee Dam would admit that the Bureau and FDR had a high dam in mind all along and quietly decided to hoodwink a Congress which they knew would never authorize it. Nonetheless, no other explanation seems plausible. Charles Weil, the Bureau engineer charged with concrete inspection, said that a “substantial” amount of the high dam foundation’s concrete had already been poured before the Roosevelt administration went to Congress in 1935 with a request to change the authorization from a low dam to a high dam. Still, he insisted that the Bureau never tried to deceive anyone. “I wouldn’t say that the Bureau tried to mislead Congress,” Weil offered. “But it had to keep in mind what Congress was willing to fund.” That, of course, is another way of saying that the Bureau chose to mislead Congress. In the beginning, before construction began, a high dam was out of the question. After $63 million had been spent building a foundation for it, however, a low dam was out of the question; at the very least,