Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [190]
“Dominy could be the most persuasive man I ever met,” Dreyfus said, “but Aspinall wouldn’t budge. He liked to think of himself as almighty principled, so he got huffy and said, ‘The Reclamation program knows no such thing as a project without beneficiaries. The answer is no.’ ”
Those kinds of principles usually end up costing the taxpayers a lot of money, but in this case they may have cost Aspinall his projects. Why would California’s and Arizona’s Congressional delegations, which outnumbered Colorado’s ten to one, vote for appropriations for five projects which would mean surrendering water their own constituents were using? Since the projects made so little sense, and were so expensive, the rest of Congress might follow their lead. Aspinall, however, had already succumbed to the twin delusions that affect so many committee chairmen—that he would be reelected forever, and that he would live nearly that long. As long as he sat in his committee chair, he could deny California and Arizona whatever he pleased unless they voted in favor of his projects. It was a reasonable argument, until he was bumped out of office four years later by a virtually unknown law professor named Alan Merson—a candidate who had campaigned heavily on the environmental principles that Aspinall often scorned. By 1987, only the Dolores Project was close to being finished—it alone would end up costing $450 million, and the water promised to be so expensive that the farmers were anxiously trying to back out of their contracts. “We were dumb and greedy,” said one Junior Hollen. “If they force us to buy the water now, it will bankrupt us.”
Meanwhile, twelve years and more than $2 billion after the passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act, the Central Arizona Project was nearly built too. It would be a Dolores Project on a far, far grander scale.
A political mirage for three generations of Arizonans, the Central Arizona Project is now a palpable mirage, as incongruous a spectacle as any on earth: a man-made river flowing uphill in a place of almost no rain. To see it there in late 1985, just being filled, induces a kind of shock, like one’s first sight of Mount McKinley or the Great Wall. But it is an illusion that works both ways. Up close, the Granite Reef Aqueduct seems almost too huge to be real. Where will all the water come from? From the air, however, the aqueduct and the river it diverts are reduced to insignificance by the landscape through which they flow—a desert that seems too vast for the most heroic pretensions of mankind. The water the aqueduct is capable of delivering is more than Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago consume together. Pour it on Arizona, however, and it would cover each acre with two hundredths of an inch. In the summer, when the temperature reaches 135 degrees at ground level, that much water would evaporate before you had a chance to blink.
To build something so vast—an aqueduct that may stretch eventually to 333 miles, pumps that will lift the water 1,249 feet, four or five receiving reservoirs to hold the water when it arrives—at a cost that may ultimately reach $3 billion, perhaps even more, would seem to demand two prerequisites: that there be a demand for all the water, and that it be available in the first place. In Arizona, all of this has been an article of blind faith for more than half a century. Build the CAP, and the aqueduct will be forever filled because of Arizona’s Compact entitlement; fill the aqueduct, and the water will be put to immediate use—that is what every politician who ever aspired to sainthood in Arizona has said. But there are a number of reasons why this will not be the case—perhaps not remotely the case. If anything, the Central Arizona Project may make the state’s water crisis worse than ever before.
When the Colorado River Basin Storage Act was bottled up in the House Interior Committee in the mid-1960s, it wasn’t just the Sierra