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By Root 1622 0

Eisenhower had an excuse to do nothing. Until the Central Arizona Project was given final shape—and that couldn’t happen until the legal battle had ended and it was determined who had rights to what water—the river’s looming deficit would remain an inconsequential fact. Once the lawsuit was settled, however, the Bureau would face two seemingly insuperable problems at once: how to build the most expensive water project of all time; and, even worse, how to authorize an even more expensive augmentation scheme that would give the Colorado Basin enough water for everything it was planning to build.

On a map of Arizona, the Colorado River can be seen making a wide circle around the northern and eastern half of the state. At every point along that six-hundred-mile sojourn, the populated center of the state is walled off from the river by mountains. In the north, the river flows in a bottomless canyon, a mile below its southern rim; to lift it out of there and lead it to Phoenix would be out of the question—even though the water, once out of the Grand Canyon, could flow downhill all the way. Closer to its mouth, the river escapes its canyon confines and flows across broad sandy wastes, but numerous ranges stand between the river and Tucson and Phoenix—the Aquarius Cliffs, the Black Mountains, the Maricopa Mountains, the Saucera Range. Regardless of where one located the point of diversion, to move a portion of the Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix would involve a pump lift of at least twelve hundred feet. Pumping irrigation water there would be like taking it out of the Hudson River and lifting it over the World Trade Center in order to water lawns on Long Island. The CAP was to be, first and foremost, an irrigation project, a rescue project to save the dying farmlands between Phoenix and Tucson; the cities would also get some water, but the farmers would receive the overwhelming share. Hardly anywhere on earth, however, is water lifted that high in order to irrigate crops, unless the water flows nearly as far downhill somewhere along its route as it was lifted uphill, so that much of the energy required to lift it can be recovered. Even then, the Second Law of Thermodynamics exacts a heavy toll: for every hundred units of energy expended to lift the water, only seventy or so can be recovered on the way back down. Using the most optimistic predictions—high-value crops, high crop prices, dirt-cheap power from preexisting dams—the Central Arizona Project was still likely to need more public welfare than anything the Bureau had built.

A simple matter of physics, then, made the Central Arizona Project even worse, in an economic sense, than the Colorado River Storage Project. But politics demanded that it be built, and in the 1960s, Arizona had power. Barry Goldwater was the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; Carl Hayden was the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He could, if he wanted, hold up every other water project in the country until his state was satisfied. And there was the issue of equity. California had its water, Nevada had its water, the upper basin was developing its water, and Arizona still had nothing. What were a couple of billion dollars in the face of these other, more important concerns?

Still, something would have to be done about the project’s horrifically poor economic rationale. And something would ultimately have to be done about the fact that the river now seemed certain to dry up if the CAP was built. Something—but what? The obvious answer was a couple of big cash register dams that could generate enough power, and enough money, to give Arizona’s irrigation farmers the 90-percent subsidy they would probably need. If the dams were big enough, there might be enough revenue left over to begin a fund that, in the future, could help build the gigantic augmentation project that the basin would require.

But where could one locate the dams? There were no sites for big dams left in Arizona, and besides, the Gila River system didn’t have nearly enough water to develop the kind of