Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [107]
In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectric capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years. We didn’t so much outmaneuver, outman, or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.
The main stem of the Columbia River didn’t have a single dam on it until 1933, when the Puget Sound Power and Light Company went out on its own and built a run-of-the-river dam called Rock Island, which produced 212,000 kilowatts of power—a mind-boggling amount in its day. Five years later, Bonneville Dam was finished and generated almost three times as much power. In 1941 came Grand Coulee; in 1953, McNary Dam; in 1955, Chief Joseph Dam; in 1957, The Dalles, contributing 1,807,000 kilowatts to the seven million or so that had already been wrung out of the river. In that same year, the Grant County Public Utility District finished Priest Rapids Dam, which added another 788,500 kilowatts. In 1961, the Chelan County PUD came back and built Rocky Reach Dam, with a capacity one million kilowatts greater than the dam by which it had gotten things off to a start twenty-eight years before. And it still wasn’t over. In 1963, the Grant County PUD added Wanapum Dam and another 831,250 kilowatts. In 1967, the Douglas County PUD completed Wells Dam. The Corps of Engineers, which had built Bonneville and Chief Joseph and McNary and The Dalles, got back into the picture in 1968 with John Day Dam, whose 2,160,000 kilowatts were second only to Grand Coulee. In that year, the Canadians finally joined in, building Keenleyside Dam, whose sole purpose was to equalize the upper river’s flow throughout the year for the benefit of navigation and power production. In 1973, they added Mica Dam, which formed the largest reservoir on the river in a remote wilderness not far from the Columbia’s headwaters. Thirteen tremendous dams in forty years.
And these were just the main-stem dams. As they were going up, the Columbia tributaries were also being chinked full of dams. Libby Dam on the Kootenai River. Albeni Falls and Boudary dams on the Pend Oreille. Cabinet Gorge and Noxon Rapids dams on the Clark Fork. Kerr and Hungry Horse on the Flathead. Chandler and Roza dams on the Yakima. Ice Harbor Dam, Lower Monumental Dam, Little Goose Dam, Lower Granite Dam, Oxbow Dam, Hells Canyon Dam, Brownlee Dam, and Palisades Dam on the Snake. Dworshak Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater. Anderson Ranch Dam on the South Fork of the Boise. Pelton and Round Butte dams on the Deschutes. Big Cliff, Foster, Green Peter, and Detroit dams on the three forks of the Santiam River. Cougar Dam on the South Fork of the McKenzie. Dexter, Lookout Point, and Hills Creek dams on the Willamette. Merwin Dam, Yale Dam, and Swift Dam on the Lewis River. Layfield and Mossyrock dams on the Cowlitz. Thirty-six great dams on one river and its tributaries—a dam a year. The Age of Dams.
The Corps of Engineers and the region’s public utilities played a big role in the damming of the Pacific Northwest because it had in abundance what the rest of the region lacked—water—so many of the dams were built for flood control, nagivation, or power. Everywhere else in the West, however, where deserts were the rule and irrigation was the be-all and end-all of existence, the Bureau reigned supreme. Within its first thirty years, it had built about three dozen projects. During the next thirty years, it built nineteen dozen more. The Burnt River Project, the Cachuma Project, the Mancos Project, the Ogden River Project, the Collbran Project, the Gila