• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1448 0

Club and the Grand Canyon dams that were responsible. The dams, it was feared, might drag the bill down to defeat on the floor of Congress, but it had to get out of committee first, and the bill’s major hurdle there—a hurdle that seemed about fifty feet high—was California. California had five members on the committee and a powerful ally in John Saylor, the senior Republican committee member, who was from Pennsylvania. Saylor was as antagonistic toward the Bureau of Reclamation as anyone in Congress; he especially loved to pick a fight with Floyd Dominy; and he was unalterably opposed to the CAP. He was so valued in office by California that tens of thousands of dollars poured into his campaign coffers from that state to keep him there.

What California demanded as the price for acquiescence was simple—devastatingly simple. Before Arizona received a drop of its entitlement, it wanted its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement guaranteed. As far as California was concerned, there would be no equitable sharing of shortages, no across-the-board cuts in times of drought; it wanted satisfaction no matter what. In fact, what it was really asking was a legislative reversal of the lawsuit it had lost in the Supreme Court. It was an outrageous demand from Arizona’s point of view, and few believed that its Congressional delegation would swallow it. But, in the end, they did.

“How do I explain it?” asked Sam Steiger, then a junior committee member from Arizona, repeating the question just asked of him. “I can’t. Obviously a deal was struck. I was too junior to be in on it. Mo Udall, Stewart’s brother, and John Rhodes were the ones in a position to do it. Why did they do it? The only answer I can think of is that they didn’t really believe the river was overallocated—that, or else they really believed we were going to get an augmentation project, even without Bridge Canyon Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation wasn’t running around Capital Hill crying, ‘The river’s overallocated! The river’s overallocated!’ I don’t know what figures they were using, but we sure as hell weren’t hearing the ones that came out a few years later. They made like there was plenty of water for everyone.”

And so, before a real fight even developed over California’s imperious demand, the CAP legislation became saddled with what is known as the California Guarantee: 4.4 million acre-feet or bust. Come drought, come calamity, California must be satisfied first.

A few years later, the Bureau was finally forced to admit that its estimate of 17.5 million acre-feet a year was a convenient fiction, and amended it to around fifteen million acre-feet. A few years after that, even the latter figure looked optimistic; independent hydrologists were putting the Colorado’s average flow at somewhere around thirteen million acre-feet, perhaps a little more. Southern California was diverting its full 4.4 million acre-feet as it had for years. The upper basin had a diversion capability that had moved past 3.6 million acre-feet and was still building moderately. Evaporation varies from year to year, but averages close to two million acre-feet from all the reservoirs on the main stem and tributaries; and Mexico must get its 1.5 million acre-feet.

Work these figures out and the Colorado River is almost used up if its flow is as low as some say. If the higher estimates are used, there are two to two and a half million acre-feet left. Now consider the projects that are authorized and, in some cases, nearly built or being built. The Central Utah Project. The Animas-La Plata Project. The Dolores Project. The Fruitland Mesa Project. The West Divide Project. The Dallas Creek Project. San Miguel, Savery Pot Hook, Paonia, Florida, and the largest of them all, the CAP. Three or four of these could send the Colorado River into “deficit”; the rest will merely make the deficit hopeless. Everything has turned out exactly as could have been predicted twenty years ago—everything, that is, except the rescue project that was supposed to save the basin states from a Sumerian fate.

The prospects that