Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [224]
At the end of December, as a series of huge, slow-moving cloud-masses wrung themselves out against the western wall of the range, the Feather River rose with hurricane suddenness. Swelling toward a crest of 250,000 cubic feet per second, it burst out of its canyon and flooded over Yuba City and Marysville, two small cities on the floodplain below, near the confluence with the Sacramento. Within hours, a parade of houses, some wrecked and some nearly intact, was floating toward San Francisco. Yuba City was substantially destroyed, first by water and then by mud. More than twenty people died.
The San Joaquin growers would never have admitted to feeling relief, but the Marysville and Yuba City disaster was the best news they had heard in years. If there had to be floods, the Feather River’s wrath was a serendipitous one, for it had already been chosen as their river of rescue.
The origins of the rescue project went back to the Bureau of Reclamation’s United Western Investigation, the two-year study of transcontinental water-diversion schemes, completed in 1951, that had been the swan song of Commissioner Mike Straus. Having looked at the possibility of diverting the Columbia, the Snake, and all the larger rivers of the Northwest to the desert Southwest, the Bureau had settled on the Klamath, which it wanted to run in reverse, through a sixty-mile tunnel, back into the Sacramento River and then south. The plan had collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, and the Eisenhower administration had administered the coup de grâce by firing Straus. But the idea of a transbasin water diversion had quickened the pulse of California’s state engineer, A. D. Edmonston, an unreconstructed, gung-ho, New Deal water-development type. In 1951, Edmonston, backed by the agricultural lobby, persuaded the legislature to give him enough money to undertake an “inventory” of the state’s water resources—where water was in surplus, where it might be needed. What emerged three years later was something else entirely. The “inventory” had metamorphosed into something called the California Water Plan—a scheme for moving water southward that virtually duplicated the Bureau’s plan. Only two things were different. There would be no Martian aqueduct leading from the Klamath River to Lake Mead; the remote Klamath was, in fact, out of the picture, replaced by the smaller but much more accessible Feather River. The other distinction was that the plan, as envisioned by Edmonston, would not be a federal project in any sense. It did not come right out and say so (perhaps because it hoped to get some federal help), but if one read between the lines, the state, or at least Edmonston, was now contemplating something this monumental on its own, just as it had originally planned the CVP. In fact, no sooner was the California Water Plan released than a new agency, the Department of Water Resources, was created out of a jumble of fifty-two agencies that had previously dealt with water, and given administrative powers to match.
Edmonston’s scheme was mesmerizing. The largest water project ever built by a state or local government was New York City’s Delaware water system, completed during World War II. The Delaware Aqueduct was eighty-five miles long and entirely underground—by far the longest hard-rock tunnel in the world. But the California Water Plan, in its first phase alone, contemplated the movement of four times more water over a distance six times as long. What was even more startling was that most of the water would go to irrigation. The Delaware Aqueduct had left New York, a Babylon of wealth, up to its ears in debt. But since each average household paid around a hundred dollars an acre-foot for water, and because the city had a huge commercial and industrial