Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [177]
The proposal for Grand Canyon dams was officially revealed on January 21, 1964, with the release of something called the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. One had only to read the title to see that, now that another New Deal Democrat was enfranchised in the White House (Lyndon Johnson was about to beat Barry Goldwater with 60 percent of the popular vote), the Bureau had happily returned to the mode of thinking prevalent during the FDR and Truman years. The plan was majestic. It contemplated two huge new dams on the Colorado River in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Both had been carefully situated so as not to flood the park itself—except for what the Bureau called “minor” flooding that would drown lower Havasu Creek, the canyon’s most beautiful side stream, and submerge Lava Falls, the river’s most thunderous rapid. But the park would sit inside a dam sandwich: Bridge Canyon Dam would back up water for ninety-three miles below it, entirely flooding the bottom of Grand Canyon National Monument, and Marble Gorge Dam would create a reservoir more than forty miles long right above it. The dams had one purpose—hydroelectric power—and a single objective: lots and lots of cash. They would not conserve any water, because there was none left to conserve; in some years, they would cause a net loss to the river through evaporation. They were there only to take advantage of the thousand feet of elevation loss between Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. Together, they would generate 2.1 million kilowatts of peaking power, marketable at premium rates. Later, the power revenues would finance an artificial river of rescue; for now it would pay for the other features of the plan.
One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles. That city and its burgeoning suburbs would thus receive a huge surge of high-quality water from northern California to replace the salty Colorado. The San Joaquin Valley would siphon off a considerable portion along the way; it was going to be rescued, for the third time, from its suicidal habit of mining groundwater. New Mexico would get Hooker Dam, which would inundate yet another scenic monument—the Gila Wilderness—and Utah would get two more projects. In the middle of the list, camouflaged under “water salvage and recovery programs,” was the most expensive item of all: the Central Arizona Project. It was the same multibillion-dollar shell game that the United Western Investigation had proposed: new water from northern California would take care of southern California’s needs so that the Colorado could be conserved for the upper basin and Arizona.
Curiously, the United Western Investigation did not even rate a passing mention in the report, though it dwelled at some length on earlier plans to solve the Southwest’s water dilemma. Evidently, the UWI was still so closely associated with a raid on the Columbia River that the framers of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan would rather have pretended that it never existed. Another name hard to find in the report was that of the Interior Secretary, Stewart Udall. There were three possible explanations for this. One—the one conservationists wanted to believe—was that the plan did not really have Udall’s support. He was, after all, being described by them as the