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By Root 1717 0

wall across the Middle Fork of the Eel that would capture twice as much water as Shasta Lake; it would create one of the biggest reservoirs in the West. The dam the Bureau wanted to build first was English Ridge, which would create a smaller reservoir on the main Eel a short distance away. Since each project required a hard-rock tunnel, about twenty miles long, to shunt the water to where it was allegedly needed, they would both be very expensive. To become economically feasible, a large proportion of their costs would have to be written off to flood control, which is nonreimbursable. The Corps of Engineers has always been vested with the authority to compute the flood-control benefits of federal dams. It was, as expected, quite generous in computing the flood-control benefits of Dos Rios; it was inexplicably niggardly in the case of English Ridge. David Shuster, who would become the operations manager for the Central Valley Project—and who would later be hounded out of the Bureau for being too fair-minded about Jimmy Carter’s water projects “hit list”—would later insist that English Ridge was a perfectly feasible project. “There was nothing wrong with English Ridge,” Shuster remembered. “A lot of the water could have gone to municipalities in the North Bay and to grape growers. Repayment-wise, it was in sound shape. The thing that killed us was the Corps wouldn’t give us the flood-control benefits they gave to Dos Rios. It was like they were using two separate formulae.”

Flood-control benefits for both dams, it would turn out, were largely a fraud. Even huge Dos Rios Dam would have reduced the thirty-five-foot crest of the monstrous 1964 flood by less than a foot—a fact which the Corps took pains to camouflage, but which its enemies, especially a local Dartmouth-educated rancher named Richard Wilson, who led the opposition, managed to bring out and make stick. It was Wilson, and Ronald Reagan—who, as governor, refused to approve the project—who ultimately killed Dos Rios Dam, but it was the infighting between the agencies that set the stage for its defeat—and for the ultimate collapse of the whole carefully orchestrated development push. By 1981, not a single one of the thirteen North Coast dams on the Corps’ and the Bureau’s priority lists had been built. In that year, moreover, all the major North Coast rivers were added to the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers system by the Carter administration—which, in theory, puts them forever off-limits to any dams.

The single cooperative achievement since the Marysville summit meeting a decade and a half earlier was the erection of New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River. There, the Marysville formula was finally tried: the Corps built the dam, the Bureau gets to market the water—if it can. By 1985, seven years after the dam was completed, not a teacup of New Melones water had been sold, which was especially infuriating to those who despaired at watching the last wild stretch of the lower Stanislaus River drowned. One reason no water had been sold was lack of demand, no matter what the Bureau said about demand “being there.” The other reason was that no canals had been built to carry water from the reservoir to the farmers’ fields. Why had they not been built? The conspiracy theorists—who, by now, include a lot of people who have watched the progress of California water politics from the losers’ side—thought they had an answer. As long as New Melones water remains unsold, it simply runs out, in carefully regulated and fully usable flows, to the Delta, where it can be sucked up by the State Water Project’s battery of ten-thousand-horsepower pumps and conveyed either to the big San Joaquin growers or to Los Angeles. It is hard to argue with people who insist that this was the intention all along.

The relatively small yield from behind New Melones Dam, however, is scarcely enough to supply the Chandler family’s Tejon Ranch or to satisfy two years’ worth of subdivision growth in southern California. As a result, the State Water Project seems destined to remain chronically undersupplied,