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By Root 1630 0

Delaware Aqueduct, stretching from the Catskill Mountains to Westchester County, is eighty-five miles long, but its diameter is only fourteen feet. Trinity Tunnel could hold four passenger trains operating on two levels. It alone would cost nearly half a billion dollars, in 1951, and it was merely the longest and biggest of numerous tunnels. The Tehachapi Tunnel, forty miles long, would move the water through the Transverse Ranges, which cordon off Los Angeles from the rest of the state. Seven known fault zones would be crossed along the aqueduct route, and one of them, the San Andreas Fault, would present a fracture zone at least two miles wide in the middle of the Tehachapi Tunnel which could pose “unusual construction problems.” An ordinary tunnel would shear if the fault slipped—it slipped nearly twenty feet in the 1906 quake—leaving Los Angeles unwashed and unquenched. “Extra-heavy supports would be required throughout this zone.”

The cost of everything—Ah Pah Dam, the other dams, the tunnels, the aqueducts, the pumps, the canals, the receiving reservoirs, and an item called a Peripheral Canal, which would be built to carry the Sacramento’s greatly swollen flow around California’s Delta—would be $3,293,050,000. It was an incredible bargain; today, a couple of nuclear power plants cost much more than that. Had the Bureau reckoned how expensive life was going to become, the Klamath Diversion might well have been built. “In those days, almost everything the Bureau proposed was being built,” Kuiper says. “But Straus decided to move cautiously on this one. If you read the report, you’ll see that we were always talking about ‘orderly development.’ That’s code talk for building at a deliberate pace, taking care to butter everyone’s bread, instead of going gung-ho, which is what they did on the Missouri. In California, you had two choices: you could build a lot of little projects on tributaries of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, or you could built one huge project on the Klamath. I don’t know whether it made better sense to do one or the other. What I do know is that Mike Straus was constitutionally incapable of seeing that the clock was already running out on these tremendous projects. He thought it was the other way around—that the Bureau would keep building bigger and bigger things. The only way Mike knew how to think was bigger and bigger. He and Bill Warne were sure the Klamath Diversion was going to be built someday, so they didn’t try to railroad it through.”

McCasland didn’t help. Contentious and prickly, he may have been a fine engineer, but he was the public relations equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Without asking clearance from the commissioner’s office, he wrote an article describing the Klamath Diversion for Civil Engineering in 1952. Northern California’s thirty-five years of passionate opposition to southern California’s diversion plans can be traced directly to that article. McCasland would not even say that these Pantagruelian waterworks would take care of the southland’s need for all time: “The plan described as the Northern California Diversion,” he wrote, “would not by any means constitute a complete water supply for the Southwest. It would meet the most imminent demands... but it would more probably constitute the initial stage of a large plan to serve much wider markets a future economy might dictate.” Clarence Kuiper says, “What I remember about that time is the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from Oregon and Washington asking me if it was true that the Bureau was planning to divert the Columbia River.” But the outrage cascading down from the Pacific Northwest was the least of the Bureau’s problems. Its main problem was that Los Angeles, for whose benefit the Klamath Diversion had mainly been conceived, was unalterably opposed to it, too.

The idea of the city it was trying to save vilifying the project it had planned in order to save it left the Bureau of Reclamation speechless. Had its engineers accepted a thing or two about law and psychology, however, they wouldn’t have