Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [172]
The investigation took two years to complete. Its conclusions filled several volumes with descriptions, economic analyses, appendices, and maps. To Clarence Kuiper, a young engineer recruited from the Corps of Engineers, “it was the closest I ever came to feeling omnipotent. We were looking at ideas even Mike Straus hadn’t thought of yet.” The UWI team raced around the Pacific rim like Rommel’s army, concocting schemes to put deserts to flight. They dinged rock samples out of canyon walls. They traced future reservoir basins by air. They floated rivers and explored by jeep. They spread contour maps across the floors of rooms and built tunnels and aqueducts with pencils. They spread oceans of theoretical water over horizons of potential farmland; on paper, they turned half the Southwest green. “Straus told us to look at every possibility,” Kuiper would recall years later. “He said, ‘Don’t you laugh at a goddamm thing.’ Well, we didn’t. We looked over every harebrained idea that ever came up. We looked at an undersea pipeline from the mouth of the Columbia to Los Angeles. Lord, we found every conceivable place where you could divert the Columbia. We looked into jumping the Willamette out of its bed at Oregon City and turning it right around in an aqueduct to California. Southern Oregon is a big mess of mountains, so we plotted a tunnel that would have been 135 miles long. We had one guy in the Bureau who thought you could keep wall-to-wall tankers moving between the mouth of the Columbia and L.A., so we looked at that, too.”
If anything, the United Western Investigation suffered from a surfeit of choices. “Numerous possibilities exist for the interbasin transfer of supplies into water-deficient regions,” wrote McCasland in the cover document, which bore the splendidly militaristic title United Western Investigation, Interim Report on Reconnaissance, Report of the Chief. You could, for example, take a few million acre-feet out of the Snake River at Twin Falls, Idaho, pump it up the south side of the Snake River plain in fifteen-foot siphons, and drop it into the Humboldt River, the only constant river in the state of Nevada, meandering small and forlorn beside Interstate 80 for three hundred miles until it disappears in shallow, salty Humboldt Lake. Then you could move the suddenly prodigious Humboldt straight across seamless desert to the Owens Valley, two hundred miles away. You could tunnel thirty miles under the White Mountains and just dump it in. Then you could quadruple the size of everything Los Angeles had built to divert the Owens River, and move the mingled waters of the Snake and the Humboldt and the Owens to L.A., to San Diego, to the Mojave Desert, and dump the surplus in the Colorado to satisfy our treaty with Mexico, leaving the other basin states with the whole Colorado to hoard for themselves.
Alternatively, you could build a whole series of dams at a more or less equal elevation on the bigger rivers of coastal Oregon and, at a level approximate to the elevation of the upper Sacramento Valley, run a gravity-diversion aqueduct from reservoir to reservoir, picking up half-million-acre-foot increments as a bus picks up passengers, then run the aqueduct beneath the Siskiyou Mountains and plop the water into Shasta Lake, then lead it south from there. You could take millions and millions of acre-feet out of the Pend Oreille in Washington, an obscure river bigger than the Wabash or the Hudson or the Sacramento, and move it by gravity—aqueduct-tunnel-aqueduct-tunnel-aqueduct-tunnel-from Albeni Falls, near the Canadian border, across the deserts of eastern Washington and Central Oregon all the way to California, passing by the Rogue and the Illinois and picking up some surplus flows, with the end result that California’s developed water yield