Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [171]
The idea of relocating distant rivers into the depletion-haunted Colorado Basin—“augmentation” was the euphemism of choice—was really nothing new. One of its earliest and most relentless proponents was William E. Warne, who was brought into the Bureau by Mike Straus and later built the California Water Project under Governor Pat Brown. As a young boy, Warne had moved from Indiana—average precipitation, thirty-six inches per year—to the Imperial Valley of California—average rainfall 2.4 inches per year—and Warne seems never to have gotten over the shock. A smooth, handsome, genial sort (though even some of his fellow Bureau men considered him water-mad), Warne in his later years would raise his voice to shouting pitch over just one issue: the “ridiculous waste” that was condoned by continuing to allow the rivers of northern California to spill practically unused out to sea. It was unconscionable, Warne would say, that those rivers were so near—“within striking distance,” as he put it—and still undammed. Warne was haunted not only by the desert, but by the desert’s growth. As a boy in the Imperial Valley, he heard stories about how it had been when not a soul lived there, ten years before. By the time his family arrived, forty thousand people had already moved in. Five years later, another forty thousand had come, and the valley was appropriating about 20 percent of what was then considered to be the Colorado’s flow. In the same period, the population of Los Angeles had gone from 100,000 to 500,000 people. “It was the wonder of the world,” Warne mused, “how that city grew.” By the time he became Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Power in 1949, Bill Warne had developed an obsession: rerouting the fabulous amount of water that spilled into the Pacific from Eureka on north.
The engineering study that would determine how best to do it was called the United Western Investigation. It is, to this day, the best-kept secret in the history of water development in the West; people who have been in the business all their lives have never heard of it. Since it would involve the movement of unprecedented flows of water over unprecedented distances at unprecedented expense, the investigation would need someone of unusual vision and character to lead it, and Mike Straus and Bill Warne would have to go outside the Bureau to locate him. The found him in Bogotá, Colombia, building dams for the descendants of conquistadors. His name was Stanford P. McCasland.
Stan McCasland had worked in the planning division of the Bureau for some years. He quit, evidently, because the predictable tedium of designing small projects on small rivers was something which he considered beneath him. In South America, where you could find unnamed tributaries of the Amazon bigger than the Colorado, he at last found the landscape of his dreams. Like a lot of Bureau engineers, McCasland had only a faint interest in irrigation; it was damming rivers that got his juices flowing. An irascible Scot, he viewed rivers not so much as challenges or opportunities but as willful monsters to be beaten into submission. In the likes of him, the rivers had an unlikely foe. “He was as skinny as a rail,” says Pat Dugan, a longtime Bureau engineer