Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [138]
It is also hard to say, in retrospect, how close Rampart Dam ever came to being built. The odds are, moderately close. But Floyd Dominy killed it.
If the dam was built, the Bureau would have no future in the last place where there were still plenty of big damsites left. Congress wouldn’t authorize another dam there for decades; the power probably wouldn’t be needed for two hundred years. That was the argument Dominy used, and used brilliantly. With Stewart Udall’s enthusiastic blessing, Dominy had the Bureau turn all of its guns on Rampart Dam—the planning division, the hydroelectric division, the demo-graphics branch: everyone who had some expertise that could cripple Rampart’s chances was enlisted in the cause. In 1967, the Interior Department produced its Rampart report, a document nearly a hundred pages long, complete with appendices and reams of supporting documentaton in the files. The report demonstrated that Rampart power had to be sold immediately or the project would be a financial fiasco of the first order. But it also showed that the power market projected by the Corps and the local boosters couldn’t possibly develop within the state—not in twenty years, not in fifty, perhaps never. Shipped to the nearest market—the Pacific Northwest—the power couldn’t possibly sell at competitive prices; the cost of transmission alone would be more than people were paying, more even than nuclear electricity.
In the end, Dominy was asked to testify on Rampart Dam, and it was one of the most brilliant performances of his career. Without anger, without malice, he tore the Corps’ justification to shreds. Even the pedestrian rhetoric of his successors—of a Gil Stamm or a Keith Higginson—might have demolished Rampart’s prospects, but Dominy spared nothing in his presentation. When he was finished, Rampart Dam lay pretty much in ruins. The project surfaced a few more times during the 1970s, then floated under and hasn’t been seen since.
Devil’s Canyon Dam, however, was seemingly dead, too—at least as far as the Bureau was concerned. (Late in the 1970s the state of Alaska announced plans to build the dam itself; it will be interesting to see whether it can without falling into the kind of financial hole that the $18 billion Itaipu Dam dug for Brazil.) And there the irony of the whole long fight between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers came full circle. Had they really cooperated—as General William Cassidy had stated they would, and must—there is no telling what they might have built. Their rivalry prevailed, and grew more intense, during one of history’s truly unique periods—a time when we had the confidence, and the money, and, one might say, the compulsion to build on a fantastically grand scale. The money invested in the dozens of relatively small projects each agency built—in many cases because the other threatened to build first—would have sufficed to build the great works they insisted were necessary, but which required extraordinary determination, cooperation, and raw political clout in order to be authorized. Fifty million here, eighty million there, a hundred million here, and soon one was talking about real money. In the 1960s, Dos Rios Dam could have been built for $400 million; today it might cost $3 billion or more. A diversion from the Columbia River to the Southwest could have been built for $6 billion or so in the sixties, and there was so much surplus energy in the Northwest that a few million acre-feet of water removed from a river that dumps 140 million acre-feet into the sea might not have been missed. Today the cost seems utterly prohibitive, and Washington and Oregon would probably resist the engineers with tanks. The opportunity was there. But the Corps of Engineers