Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [131]
No one will ever know how many ill-conceived water projects were built by the Bureau and the Corps simply because the one agency thought the other would build it first. What is clear, thanks to long-hidden files from the Bureau that have come to light, is that the Corps of Engineers has kept a full-court press on the Bureau since it moved on the Kings and Kern rivers forty years ago. And it was during this period that by far the most objectionable projects were built.
A May 19, 1962, memorandum from Bruce Johnson, the Bureau’s regional director in Billings, Montana, to Floyd Dominy offers a vivid illustration of how far things could go. Johnson’s memo discussed a series of potential conflicts between the Bureau and the Corps in the upper Missouri Basin. One project which the Corps was talking about building at the time was Bowman-Haley, a dam on the Grand River in North Dakota—which is not much of a river, despite its name. “They will build [Bowman-Haley] if they get the money,” Johnson warned Dominy. “I predict the state will see to it that they get the money unless steps are taken to have the Secretary of the Interior [that is, the Bureau] authorized to build it.”
Would it make sense for the Bureau to build it, in that case? “We have reported on Bowman-Haley, always unfavorably, at various times for some thirty years,” Johnson wrote. “... If we take this on we will be building another tributary dam with little to show in the way of repayment contracts. Benefits and repayment are based on a delivery of 3,000 acre-feet per year. However, some years delivery of this amount of water will not be possible.” It was, in short, a perfectly miserable Reclamation project, a project whose yield was not only pitiable, but impossible to guarantee. But it made no better sense, Johnson quickly added, for the Corps to build the dam instead. Flood control was a poor justification; the damsite was so near the river’s headwaters that most of the floods were raised downstream. That left municipal water supply as the sole conceivable justification. But “most of the municipal and industrial [water-supply] benefits,” he continued, “are anticipatory of urban and industrial growth.” And not only was North Dakota the one state in the union that was losing population, but the little town of Haley—the town that would presumably get the water—is so small it wasn’t even listed in the American Automobile Association’s road atlas for 1976. The water might be piped to Bowman, a considerable distance away, but even Bowman, a relative metropolois, had only thirteen hundred people. If the dam were justified on the basis of local water supply, then, it would give Bowman and Haley about two and a half acre-feet per person—twelve times as much water as average per-capita use.
It was difficult to conceive of a more worthless project, but in the 1950s and 1960s projects as dubious as Bowman-Haley had a way of getting built. The agency that ended up building it was, indeed, the Corps of Engineers; authorized by Congress in 1962, Bowman-Haley was finally completed eight years later. Seeing it there, on a piddling river snaking through the drought-bleached rises and swales of western North Dakota, one needn’t be a hydrologist or an engineer to fathom why Bruce Johnson was right. The dam itself is huge: more than a mile across and seventy-nine feet high from the base, it has nearly half the bulk of the smaller of the Corps’s main-stem Missouri dams. The reservoir, by contrast, is tiny and shallow, a puddle as reservoirs go; it holds only 19,780