Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [108]
By 1956, the Congress had voted 110 separate authorizations for the Bureau of Reclamation, some encompassing a dozen or more irrigation projects and dams. Of these, seventy-seven—nearly three-quarters—were authorized between 1928 and 1956, along with hundreds of projects built by the Corps of Engineers in the East and West. In that astonishingly brief twenty-eight-year period between the first preparations for Hoover Dam and the passage of the Colorado River Storage Project Act, the most fateful transformation that has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere, was wrought.
It was profound change—profound and permanent. You can levee a river, dredge it, riprap it, channelize it, straighten it, do almost anything to it except build a dam on it, and unless you maintain your works diligently, nature will soon take the river back. Simple diversion works of great ancient civilizations collapsed not long after the civilizations themselves did; for the most part, a remnant here and there is all that remains. Had the Assyrians built Grand Coulee Dam, howver, it would sit exactly where it does today, looking exactly as it did when it was built. The only thing different is that the dam would no longer function as a dam. It would be a waterfall. The reservoir behind it would have long since silted up.
And the effects would go far beyond the natural world. In the Northwest, the dams produced so much cheap hydroelectricity that hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to the region during and after the war did not bother to insulate their homes. Insulation was expensive; electricity was dirt-cheap. In 1974, $196.01 worth of power from Con Edison in New York would have cost $24 if purchased from Seattle City Light. (For decades, the Northwest and British Columbia have had the highest rates of electricity consumption in the world.) The result was that by the 1970s, to everyone’s amazement, the seemingly limitless hydroelectric bonanza was coming to an end; brown-outs were being predicted for the 1980s. Since the good damsites were gone, the region’s utilities and their federal power broker, the Bonneville Power Administration—another product of the go-go years—launched a program of coal and nuclear powerplant construction which, viewed in retrospect, seems more like dementia than the rational, orderly planning it was purported to be. Of the twenty-four thousand-megawatt plants that were to be built under the Washington Public Power Supply System—one a year—five were begun, only to be scrapped or mothballed, half-completed, a few years later, threatening to cause the biggest municipal bond default in history. The cost of their construction, driven by inflation and hyperactive interest rates, drove electricity rates up, which immediately drove demand down, which drove rates further up, which drove demand further down—a self-perpetuating vortex known among municipal bond traders and their hapless victims and the region’s hollow-eyed