Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [136]
The Corps’ dream project, Rampart Dam on the Yukon River, was, at last, an opportunity to show the world what it could really do. It wasn’t its size that was so breathtaking—although, with a speculative height of 530 feet and a length of 4,700 feet, it had the dimensions of Grand Coulee—as the size of the reservoir that would form behind it. Lake Rampart would become the largest reservoir in the world. It would cover 10,800 square miles, making it almost exactly the size of Lake Erie. And it was the power—five million kilowatts of it, two and a half times more than the initial output of Grand Coulee. Rampart was, by far, the grandest virgin hydroelectric damsite under the American flag; there were only a dozen like it in the entire world.
The Bureau’s project, Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, was, by contrast, almost invisible. But it was still huge: a high plug in a great canyon on the river which ranked sixteenth in the United States in terms of annual flow, Devil’s Canyon would produce hundreds and hundreds of megawatts of power, depending on how high it was built. In Alaska, it was second only to Rampart as a hydropower site.
The Bureau’s dam would drown Devil’s Canyon, a remote stretch of almost unbelievable wildwater rapids about a hundred miles north of Anchorage. Even fish couldn’t navigate those rapids, and no sane person would try—although in the mid 1970s, a group of kayakers led by Dr. Walt Blackadar, a fifty-three-year-old surgeon from Salmon, Idaho, did, and succeeded, at least in the sense that none of them died. Devil’s Canyon’s value was mere spectacle, even if it was the greatest spectacle of whitewater on the North American continent.
Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably without precedent in the world. It would drown the entire Yukon Flats, a sightless plain of marshes, bogs, and small shallow lakes that nurtures more ducks than all of the United States below the Canadian border. In its report on the project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” At least a million and a half ducks were contributed to the North American flyways by the Yukon Flats, besides 12,500 geese, thousands of swans, an estimated ten thousand little brown cranes, eagles, sandhill cranes, osprey, and moose—thousands and thousands of moose, to which such boggy habitat was pure paradise. The ducks, the moose, the geese, and the swans all required drowned lands, shallow wet habitat, and the Yukon Flats were the greatest continuous expanse of it in North America.
There were salmon. More than a quarter of a million salmon passed through Rampart Canyon every year, some of them destined to go through two time zones to spawning tributaries all the way across Alaska and into Canada. A high dam would end their migration, irrevocably. The Corps’ plan to lift them out and carry them across the 250-mile reservoir in barges wouldn’t help, because the tiny fry couldn’t possibly navigate such a vast body of slack water on their way back to the sea.
There were also furbearing animals—wolverines, lynx, weasels, martins, muskrat, otter, mink, beaver—animals which were the livelihood, to greater or lesser degrees, of most of the Yukon people. Some forty thousand pelts, accoridng to the Fish and Wildlife Service, could be taken from the area to be covered by the reservoir on a sustained-yield basis every year.
And there were people—twelve hundred of them in the taking area, another eight or nine thousand whose livelihoods would be drastically affected, by either the drowning of animal habitat or the end of the salmon runs. Many of those people were Canadian citizens, many others were American Indians and Eskimos who had been promised,