Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [230]
In the last days of the legislative session in 1959, the legislature gave final approval to the Burns-Porter Act, which authorized the Feather River Project—now rechristened the California Water Project—subject to a statewide referendum on the bond issue scheduled for November of the following year. Once again Pat Brown had shown what great Irish politician’s instincts he possessed. One of the two sponsors, Hugh Burns, was a northern Californian who had made a reputation opposing water diversions from the north. Brown, among whose attributes modesty was notably absent, would later boast, “The fact that I selected Hugh Burns to carry the bill in the Senate ... that was political genius if I do say so myself.” Cyril Magnin, “Mr. San Francisco,” was persuaded to serve as campaign chairman there. The supporters put on prominent display in southern California were fiscal conservatives and Republicans. Everyone would get a little water, too: Napa County, Alameda County, the Santa Clara Valley. But the Kern County Water Agency alone would get thirty times as much as all of California north of San Francisco.
Only in December, after the legislature had already authorized the project, did the Department of Water Resources make a stab at an economic justification, in a report called An Investigation of Alternative Aqueduct Systems to Serve Southern California. Instead of trying to justify the project by weighing costs against benefits—which is what the Bureau of Reclamation did, or went through the motions of doing—it compared the cost of the project to the most expensive alternative: desalinating seawater. On that basis, it concluded that the project made sense. But as Jack Hirschleifer disdainfully commented in his RAND Corporation report, you can justify anything if you compare it to a more expensive alternative.
The critics were too few and too late. On Friday, November 4, 1960, just four days before the referendum was scheduled, the Metropolitan Water District capitulated and signed the contracts that indicated its support. The Los Angeles Times was now in favor. The only widely read newspaper that adamantly opposed the plan was the San Francisco Chronicle. When the votes finally came in, forty-eight of the fifty-eight counties in the state had voted against the bonds. But the populous counties in the artificial paradise of southern California all went heavily for the project. It was, after all, early November, and they hadn’t seen real rain since April. November—the last days before the rainy season began. That was another little bit of subtlety from Pat Brown. The bond issue passed by 174,000 votes.
The California Aqueduct begins at Oroville Dam, an inverted pyramid of such improbable dimensions—the height of the Pan Am Building, the length of the Golden Gate Bridge—that it appears much smaller than it actually is. In February of 1980, in the midst of a long spell of wet Pacific fronts, Oroville Reservoir, despite its capacity of something like a trillion gallons, was full, and the dam was spilling—seventy thousand cubic feet per second, the Hudson River in full flood, roaring down the spillway at forty miles per hour, sending a plume of mist a thousand feet in the air.
Below the dam and the Thermalito Afterbay the Feather River joins the Sacramento, which flows through the Delta out to San Francisco Bay. In the winter of 1980, the Delta, a huge reclaimed marsh protected by weakening dikes made of peat, was in danger of being reclaimed by nature; the levees were being repeatedly breached by the flood, and farmed tracts of three thousand acres were disappearing