Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [104]
Hoover was big; Shasta was half again as big; Grand Coulee was bigger than both together. Many of the workers who came up to build it were those who had just finished Hoover. When they imagined it filling this huge U-shaped canyon, they were speechless. “When they worked on Hoover they thought it made everything else look like nothing,” says Phil Nalder. “When they saw what we were going to build here they said it made Hoover look like nothing.”
After a while, visitors being taken around the damsite became tired of the phrase “largest in the world.” The mass (10.5 million cubic yards) and crest length (four-fifths of a mile) were, for a concrete dam, the largest and longest in the world. The concrete-mixing plant, the spillway, the generators, the powerhouse, the pumps, the penstocks, and the pump lift from the reservoir to the irrigated benchlands would all be the largest in the world, and as the dam went up the engineers were still scratching their heads about how to lift such an immense volume of water thirty stories high. The turbines, the scroll casings, the conveyor belts, the forms, the cofferdams, and the concentration of brothels and bars within a five-mile radius were also the largest in the world. The dam’s dimensions—height and length—were roughly those of the Golden Gate Bridge—it was not quite as high or long—but it was solid, and, at the base, five times as wide. Grand Coulee would use more lumber—130 million board feet—than any edifice ever built, but it was a tiny fraction of the dam’s total mass, and none of it was even visible. Like Hoover, the dam was so massive it would ordinarily have required hundreds of years to cool down, and cooling pipe had to be laid through it at close intervals. Laid out in a straight line, the pipe would have connected Seattle to Chicago.
The astonishing thing about Grand Coulee—about the whole era—was that people just went out and built it, built anything, without knowing exactly how to do it or whether it could even be done. There were no task forces, no special commissions, no proposed possible preliminary outlines of conceivable tentative recommendations. Tremendous environmental impacts, but no environmental impact statements. When Chuck Weil applied for a job on Grand Coulee, he didn’t know the first thing about concrete; before long, he was inspecting more concrete than anyone in history. Phil Nalder was trained as an electrical engineer; he started as a tracer (one rung below draftsman) and, later on, was put in charge of the whole project. Once, well into construction, a mudslide the size of a small mountain came off one side of the canyon and threatened to cover the foundation of the dam. To stabilize it, the Bureau ran around the Northwest looking for the biggest refrigeration units it could find; then it ran supercooled brine through the slide and froze it while construction continued. No one had ever tried it before, but it worked. When one of the cofferdams sprang a huge leak, it was plugged with old mattresses. The dam was finished and in service by September of 1941, an unbelievable sight. The three largest ocean liners in the world could have sat atop its crest like bathtub toys.
Much of the country thought Grand Coulee was marvelous, but it was so gigantic a project that it had to invite some kind of attack. Private utilities, not quite brave enough to lambast so popular