Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [129]
Nineteen years later, Robert Pafford, then retired, never saw a bit of irony in this position. During an interview in 1983, he down-played the rivalry between the Bureau and the Corps—“we had our points of contention, but it was nothing serious”—and said that he “didn’t blame Bill Warne for playing both ends against the middle.” After all, he said, “you might have done the same thing yourself.” Warne, whom he referred to as a “great guy,” had “a legal obligation to deliver water to his own constituency—those contracts with the San Joaquin farmers were valid contracts and he couldn’t just ignore them.” But why would the Bureau go out of its way to help a group of giant corporate farmers who might put the Bureau’s little farmers out of business? “Our farmers had water at $3.50 an acre-foot. No way anyone is going to compete with that.” Involuntarily, Pafford admitted what the Bureau has always tried to deny: that its cheap water gives its client farmers an unfair advantage over all the other farmers of the nation.
Two years after the secret 1965 meeting, however, no agreement had been reached on Marysville Dam; evidently, neither federal party would yield (Floyd Dominy, a proud man, privately loathed the Corps of Engineers, and probably refused to go along with Pafford’s recommendation), and each had the power to hang the project up in Congress, which appropriated no money for construction by anyone. By 1966, in fact, Pat Brown and Bill Warne evidently realized that their strategy of pitting the Bureau against the Corps could backfire on them. If the agencies became too competitive, then nothing might get built, just as a pair of rutting elk can lock horns so hopelessly that both of them starve. As a result, that year saw the formation of a new suprabureaucratic entity called the California State-Federal Interagency Group—William E. Warne, chairman—which immediately issued a call for a Herculean amount of water development, most of it on the undammed rivers of the isolated, rainy North Coast. On a big wall map depicting what they wanted to build, one saw, traced in red, a Dos Rios Reservoir and an English Ridge Reservoir and a Sequoia Reservoir and an Etsel Reservoir and a Panther Reservoir and a Frost Reservoir and a Sebow Reservoir and a Mina Reservoir on the Eel—eight reservoirs on three forks of a middle-size river that was nearly dry from June to October. And that wasn’t all. There was a Baseline and a Dinsmore Dam on the Van Duzen. There was a Butler Valley and an Anderson Ford and an enlarged Ruth Reservoir (a smaller one already existed) on the Mad River. Sounding like the Creator himself, Bill Warne, in his introduction to the report, described how the waters had been divided up: “The upper main Eel above the Middle Fork, as shown on attached Chart One, was assigned to the Bureau of Reclamation.... The main Eel between the Middle Fork and the South Fork was assigned to the Corps of Engineers ... the Van Duzen River Basin to the Bureau, the Lower Eel to the Corps....” Nothing was to be built by California itself, though it, of course, would reap the rewards, especially its big growers, who would receive millions of acre-feet of water via long tunnels drilled through the Coast Range. The whole scheme, said Warne in his introductory remarks, represented “a new chapter in California’s illustrious history of water planning.”
But it wouldn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the feuding agencies were about to lock horns and starve over the first two dams on their priority lists.
The North Coast dam that the state and the Corps passionately wanted to build was Dos Rios, a seventy-three-story earthfill