Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [137]
The whole idea behind Rampart Dam was to turn Alaska, overnight, into an industrial subcontinent. Five million kilowatts were enough to heat and light Anchorage and ten other cities its size, with power left over for a large aluminum smelter, a large munitions plant, a couple of pulp and paper mills, a refinery, perhaps even a uranium-enrichment facility tucked safely away in the wilderness—and even then, about half of the power would be left over for export. But that was the problem. Export where? The dam made sense only if all of the power could be immediately sold.
Realistically speaking, the dam made no sense at all. Neither did Devil’s Canyon Dam. The last thing Alaska had to worry about was an energy crisis. It had 300,000 inhabitants; its population could fit inside a few square blocks of Manhattan. Even then, before the gigantic North Slope oil field was discovered, it had proven oil reserves estimated at 170 million barrels (the North Slope was to increase the figure by some ten billion more). It had 360 million board-feet of timber; the driftwood floating down the Susitna River seemed enough fuel to fulfill Anchorage’s needs. It had, right around Anchorage, some of the most dramatic tidal variations in the world; the difference between high and low tide approached twenty feet, and a single tidal project taking advantage of similar conditions at DeRance, France, was producing hundreds of megawatts, more than Anchorage (which held half of Alaska’s population) would need for decades. Mainly, though, it had plenty of smaller hydroelectric sites scattered about, some of them practically at Anchorage’s doorstep. They should be developed first—that was the “orderly” water development the water planners were always talking about.
The problem was simply that Alaska might have to build those itself.
Behind their fiercely independent stance, Alaskans, in the 1960s, were a people completely dependent on Washington, D.C. Their major industry, after fishing, was the U.S. military; their third major industry was the rest of the U.S. government. Alaskans spoke of their state as a “colony,” but as colonies go they had themselves a pretty good thing, and they exhibited all the character traits of colonial people—which is to say that they wanted to exploit “their” resources for themselves, but expected the federal government to pay the cost.
Senator Ernest Gruening, formerly a governor of the state, was the main booster of Rampart; he lobbied for it with a zeal that bordered on the fanatic. Behind him were pressure groups like Yukon Power for America, or the more picturesque North of the Range association, which said in its brochures that Alaska’s future depended on “coming forward with both guns blazing.” What mattered most to the boosters was that Rampart was an opportunity—the first real opportunity—to leave mankind’s mark on a place that held it in magnificent contempt. George Sundborg, Gruening’s administrative assistant, dismissed the area to be drowned by the dam as practically worthless; there were “not more than ten flush toilets in it.” Gruening went further: it was totally worthless. “[T]he Yukon Flats,” he wrote, “—a mammoth swamp—from the standpoint of human habitability is about as worthless and useless an area as can be found in the path of any hydroelectric development. Scenically it is zero. In fact, it is one of the few really ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty.”
And, since these were the 1960s, and since this was the army that wanted to build the project, there may have been a further consideration working behind Rampart Dam. Ernest Gruening had, he said, recently returned from Russia, where he had seen “hydroelectric power dams larger than the largest in America.” The dam, then, was to be