Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [116]
The fight now began to get serious. In its budget request for fiscal year 1947, the Truman administration said that the War Department’s earlier requests to begin construction on both the Kings and Kern river were to be considered “officially eliminated.” There were to be no further requests from the Corps of Engineers pending “a decision by the President as to the course to be followed on these works.” In his personal testimony during the appropriations hearings, however, the Chief of Engineers calmly announced that “we are ready to make a definite recommendation to undertake the construction”—a remark that could only be interpreted as smug defiance once again of his commander in chief.
Had Roosevelt not died, the Corps might well have lost the battle. But Harry Truman lacked the romantic feeling about the Reclamation program that Roosevelt had, and he was from a state where the Corps was generally loved. Ickes, the old curmudgeon, was gone, too, replaced by the more conciliatory Cap Krug. In the end, the Corps simply played a waiting game, confident that the growers’ friends in Congress would extract money with which it could begin work on both the Kings and the Kern—which they soon did. Truman was so angry that he impounded the first funds, but he gradually lost interest in the whole affair. By 1948, he and Krug had given up. The Kings and Kern rivers belonged to the Corps.
The Army Engineers did accede to Truman’s request that they collect a one-time user fee from the growers. The figure settled on was $14,250,000, which covered just a third of the $42,072,000 cost of Pine Flat Dam. Considering the tens of thousands of new acres that would be opened to double-crop production when the floodwaters were stored in the Pine Flat and Isabella reservoirs, the “user fee” was more tokenism than anything else.
The covert liaison between the Corps of Engineers and the world’s largest irrigation farmers was to live on. A few years later, the Corps added insult to injury by damming the Kaweah and the Tule rivers, which, by rights, should have been Reclamation rivers, too. But as an example of government subsidizing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, nothing would quite equal its performance thirty-five years later in the Tulare Lake floods of 1983.
During the El Niño winter of 1983, when the eastern Pacific’s resident bulge of high pressure migrated to Australia and the storm door was left open for months, much of California got double or triple its normal precipitation. The previous year hadn’t been much different. By the early spring of 1983, all four Corps of Engineers dams were dumping hundreds of thousands of acre-feet over their spillways as the largest snowpack in the annals of official California weather records melted. Because the farmlands in what used to be Tulare Lake were now protected by dikes, most of the water couldn’t enter its old basin and had to go elsewhere. When the floodwaters began encroaching on nearby towns, the Corps of Engineers spent $2.7 million in emergency funds to erect levees around them. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, except that 80,000 acres of old lake bottom—land that could have absorbed the floods—remained dry; one need only have breached one of the levees that had since been built around the ex-lake. But the Tulare Lake Irrigation District, dominated by Salyer and Boswell, wouldn’t have that, so the growers convinced the Corps to spend taxpayers’ money on levees in order that their land, the natural catch basin for the floods, could remain in subsidized production.
However, El Niño was soon to prove too much even for the big growers and the Army Engineers. By March of 1983, the flooding rivers were out of control and one of the lake levees was breached, inundating thirty thousand acres of farmland. The Tulare Lake Irrigation District immediately applied to the Corps for a permit to pump out the water and send it over the Tulare Basin divide into the San Joaquin River, which feeds San Francisco Bay. There was nothing inherently wrong with