Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [181]
In June of 1965, with no discernible opposition, Senator Henry Jackson tacked an innocent-looking rider onto an innocuous-seeming bill that established standardized guidelines for the allocation of costs to fish and wildlife enhancement. What the rider did, in a couple of brief sentences, was prohibit the Bureau of Reclamation from undertaking feasibility studies that Congress did not approve in advance. The effect of the maneuver, which few recognized at first, was the same as if Jackson had strung a six-hundred-volt electrified fence along the entire south bank of the Columbia River. Without a feasibility study, the Bureau couldn’t approach Congress for authorization. Without a Congressional authorization, it couldn’t build. Explaining his amendment to a couple of reporters who were smart enough to see what it meant, Jackson made no mention of the Columbia River. He was annoyed, he said, by the Bureau’s habit of “working up local interest and enthusiasm for projects in the field before presenting its case to Congress.” Such tactics, he said, put Congress in a “take it or leave it position” when the Bureau came to authorization hearings with a gaggle of local politicians and noisy project boosters in tow. His amendment was nothing for the Bureau to get upset about; “the Corps of Engineers has operated under similar provisions for many years.”
It was true that the Corps operated under a similar restriction; it was also true that it rarely paid much attention to it. But Jackson’s rider had made illegal the feasibility study that Dominy had quietly ordered on the Columbia diversion. Jackson, who obviously had heard rumors of the secret plan, was out to kill it in its embryonic state. The Northwest had water to spare, but it no longer had power to spare, and nearly all of its electricity came from dams. To remove ten million acre-feet from the Columbia River meant a reduction of several billion kilowatt-hours in power output, unless one diverted the water below the dams. The Bureau would undoubtedly want to do that; but suppose the pumping cost of a diversion from low elevation would add tremendously to the project’s cost, and it made much more sense to divert above the dams? If the enormous momentum that could develop behind the diversion scheme really got rolling, the Northwest would look awfully selfish refusing to part with some of its superabundant water just because it insisted on paying one-fourth the average national price for electricity.
“I told Jackson that we ought to let them study the idea,” recalled Daniel Dreyfus, who was then the Senator’s closest aide. “There was no way it was going to be economically feasible. Twenty years earlier, maybe. In the sixties, absolutely not. ‘Let’s let ’em study it,’ I told Jackson. ‘Study the damned thing and it will slay itself. It’s a crazy idea.’ But his reasoning was that there’d been other crazy projects that got built just because they were studied. I still never thought it could get built, but he was right on that point.”
Without a feasibility study—which Jackson, as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, would never allow—the Columbia diversion was stillborn. What is more interesting is how quickly the Trinity Diversion died with it, even though Jackson had not publicly opposed it. One reason may have been that Los Angeles viewed it, as it had viewed the United Western Investigation, as a threat—an implied source of water that wasn’t the Colorado River (it didn’t mind the Columbia because that source was really big). But another and better reason was that it didn’t make any economic sense. The Trinity River offered too little water at too great an expense. No matter what the cost or opposition, the Colorado Basin had to get its hands on the Klamath, the Snake, or the Columbia; those were the only rivers left in the American West that were worth thinking about.