Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [170]
As it would do on innumerable occasions, the Bureau refused to believe any expert who told it what it didn’t want to hear. Three years later, it was frantically lobbying the Colorado River Storage Project through Congress, as if it considered Hill’s figures bunk (if he was right, some of the upper-basin reservoirs it wanted to build might never fill). Then, despite mounting evidence that Hill was more right than wrong, it began planning the Central Arizona Project, which would divert another two million acre-feet from the lower basin to Phoenix and Tucson and the sinking farmland in between. Even as it continued to hold forth for 17.5 million acre-feet, however, the Bureau was beginning to develop some serious internal doubts—doubts which it would attempt to conceal for several more years, but which, in the meantime, would lead it on the most ambitious quest for water in U.S. history.
On August 18, 1965, the Bureau’s resident expert on the Colorado River, Randy Riter, forwarded a long letter to Commissioner Floyd Dominy by blue envelope. Blue-envelope mail was meant to be seen by only the commissioner, the regional directors, and a small handful of top assistants. It was the Bureau’s version of a diplomatic pouch, and the contents usually meant trouble.
Riter, a hydrologist and a bishop in the Mormon church, had just attended a meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a group whose purpose is to prevent a single drop of water from leaving that state’s borders without first having been put to beneficial use. The featured speaker at the closed-door meeting was Royce Tipton, a consulting hydrologist in whom the Bureau placed considerable stock. Tipton’s reluctant conclusion, Riter told Dominy, was that “there is not enough water in the Colorado River to permit the Upper Basin to fully use its apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet and still meet its compact obligations to deliver water at Lee Ferry.” Tipton’s estimate of the river’s flow was a lot more optimistic than Hill’s had been, but even he felt that it should be set no higher than fifteen million acre-feet. In that case, if one divided the shortage equally between the two basins, each would be left with 6.3 million acre-feet. After you deducted another 1.5 million acre-feet or so for evaporation, and another 1.5 million acre-feet for Mexico, you had a figure low enough to throw seven states into panic.
The implications were enough to make the Bureau panic, too. The Colorado River Storage Project, which it had begun to build—Glen Canyon Dam was already completed—and the Central Arizona Project, which it dearly wanted, were both predicated on the availability of 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin. What if it invested billions in both projects only to find that there wasn’t nearly enough water in the river to operate them? The upper-basin projects, in particular, were critically dependent on the full volume of water flowing through the dams; that was the only way the Bureau could generate enough hydroelectric income to give them the illusion of being economically “viable.” A shortfall of nearly two million acre-feet could initiate a chain of bankruptcies among thousands of farmers or else force the Bureau to appeal to Congress for rescue. It would also open up a ghastly can of worms involving water rights. Would the shortages come equally out of each basin’s hide, or would the earlier projects invoke seniority and try to keep their water under the doctrine of appropriate rights? Obviously, the new figures could knock the whole painstakingly constructed edifice of the Colorado River Compact into rubble. And what would happen when someone discovered that the Bureau had been ignoring warnings such as Hill’s and Tipton’s for years?
As far as Riter was concerned, there was only one way