• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1508 0

work—and its transmutation into one of history’s most successful bureaucracies—began late in the nineteenth century, when it took upon itself the task of restyling America’s largest rivers to accommodate barge traffic and, occasionally, deep-draft ships. At the same time, it found a role for itself in flood control, which it first accomplished by building levees and dikes, and then, after denying for years that reservoirs could control floods, by building flood-control reservoirs. And it built them at a pace that would have left the most ambitious pharaoh dazzled—something like six hundred in sixty years.

The Army Engineers have so many hands in so many different types of work that their various activities sometimes cancel each other out. The Corps drains and channels wetlands—it has ruined more wetlands than anyone in history, except perhaps its counterpart in the Soviet Union—yet sometimes prohibits the draining and dredging of wetlands by private developers and other interests. (This was a role forced on the Corps by the Congress, not one it undertook voluntarily.) Its dams control flooding, while its stream-channelization and wetlands-drainage programs cause it. Its subsidization of intensive agriculture—which it does by turning wetlands into dry land, so they may then become soybean fields—increases soil erosion, which pours into the nation’s rivers, which the Corps then has to dredge more frequently.

Cynics say this is all done by design, because the Corps of Engineers’ motto, “Building Tomorrow Today,” really ought to be “Keep Busy.” Its range of activities is breathtaking: the Corps dams rivers, deepens rivers, straightens rivers, ripraps rivers, builds bridges across rivers, builds huge navigation locks and dams, builds groins on rivers and beaches, builds hatcheries, builds breakwaters, builds piers, and repairs beach erosion (finally fulfilling the first stage of a destiny conservationists have long wished on it: carrying sandpiles from one end of the country to the other and back again). The works for which the Corps is most famous—or notorious, depending on one’s point of view—are the monumental inland navigation projects such as Red River, Tennessee-Tombigbee, and Arkansas River. However, though each of these may cost billions to begin with, and hundreds of millions to maintain, the opportunities for such work are pretty thin. Opportunities for serious work come most frequently in the form of flood-control and water-supply dams.

The Corps confined its activities mainly to the East and Middle West until the Great Depression—it is widely, and falsely, regarded as the “eastern counterpart” of the Bureau of Reclamation—but the temptations of the West ultimately proved too much to resist. Throughout much of the East, it is hard to find a decent spot for a dam. There are few tight gorges and valleys, or there are few natural basins behind them, or there are too many people along rivers who would have to be moved. (Not that uprooting and relocating people particularly bothers the Army Engineers; it is more a matter of expense.) The West, however, is a dam builder’s nirvana, full of deep, narrow canyons and gunsight gaps opening into expansive basins. The West is also more sparsely populated, and has floods—enormous floods—because its precipitation tends to be both erratic and highly seasonal, and because of this, the groundcover, compared with the East, is spare. With little in the way of grass or forests or wetlands to hold it back, runoff during the storms is extreme. Small streams, even tiny creeks, have flowed at rates approaching the country’s largest rivers. They rarely flow like this for long, but a few minutes is all it takes to float away a town. Bijou Creek in Colorado, nearly always dry, has gone over 400,000 cubic feet per second after an eight-inch rainstorm. California’s Eel River peaked at 765,000 cfs—the flow of the Mississippi and the Columbia combined—during the Christmas flood of 1964.

On many rivers in the West a dam built for irrigation will incidentally control floods. But the equation also