Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [178]
The most interesting curiosity about the plan, however, was the obvious discrepancy between the amount of new water the Trinity River could deliver and the looming shortfall in the Colorado River. At the moment the plan was released, the second-largest reservoir in California, Clair Engle Lake, was beginning to fill on the upper reaches of the Trinity. Its capacity of 2,448,000 acre-feet was not much less than the river’s annual flow of 3,958,000 acre-feet. Clair Engle Lake was a main feature of the Central Valley Project; its water, therefore, was exclusively for California’s use. According to the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, only 1.2 million acre-feet would be left in the Trinity to augment the Colorado River—and that was assuming the Trinity, one of the world’s great salmon and steelhead rivers, would be bled virtually dry before reaching the sea. But the shortfall which the Bureau was projecting in the Colorado Basin, privately if not publicly, was at least 2.5 million acre-feet. Where would the other 1.3 million acre-feet come from? The Pacific Northwest Water Plan said nothing about it. It only hinted that it “does not provide an overall solution for the region’s water needs,” then failed to mention what such an ultimate solution would be. The Bureau’s maps had other reservoirs all over the place, drawn in gray—several on the Eel River, one on Cache Creek, the huge Ah Pah reservoir on the Klamath—but referred to these as “alternative storage possibilities,” as if they might substitute for, but not augment, the Trinity dams. Where, then, was water for six million people to come from?
In the Pacific Northwest, there was a lot of suspicion that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was merely a smokescreen for a much larger plan, long a gleam in the Colorado Basin’s eye, to tap the Columbia River. Such paranoia was inflamed by occasional speeches delivered to sympathetic ears by some of the Bureau’s engineers, insisting that this was the final solution that would someday have to be built to allow continued growth in the parching Southwest. Officially, however, the Interior Department went to great lengths to reassure the Northwest that it had no such designs. Udall publicly scoffed at the notion of diverting the Columbia, and Floyd Dominy, the Bureau commissioner, sharply reprimanded his underlings if they even mentioned the idea. But the truth of the matter was that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was a smokescreen. The Columbia was on Udall’s and Dominy’s minds the entire time.
On December 15, 1964, less than a year after the Pacific Southwest plan was revealed, a four-hour-long meeting quietly took place at the regal new offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (Built on a hill at one end of Sunset Boulevard, the MWD headquarters had a splendid view of the immense sprawl and traffic congestion it had helped create—four freeways converged right below its windows—but it was walled off from same by a forest of fountains and, fittingly, a moat.) The participants in the meeting were Udall, Dominy, Interior solicitor Edward Weinberg, Los Angeles Congressman Chet Holifeld (whose twin passions were water diversion and nuclear power), and seven carefully selected members of the MWD. Officially, this was a meeting that never took place, but as the chairman of the MWD, Joe Jensen, enthused in a “Confidential Report to MWD Directors,” it was “one of the most constructive conferences we have attended.” Udall, he reported, “expects