Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [232]
Having surmounted the Tehachapis, the water charges downhill again through closed siphons and a battery of turbines that steal some of its energy back. Soon it is in an open aqueduct again, which ultimately forks like an interstate highway: the West Branch goes straight to Los Angeles, and the East Branch continues southward across the high Mojave Desert to the vicinity of Riverside, where it terminates in Lake Perris—a reservoir. Lake Perris is six hundred miles from Oroville Dam.
Walking along the East Branch Aqueduct, you see people strolling, bicycling, and fishing as if this were a river through a city park instead of a concrete highway of water under a blazing sun in a shadeless desert where it rains seven or eight times a year. The Department of Water Resources stocks the aqueduct with fish—that way it can write off a fraction of the project’s cost to recreation—but fish seem to find their way in there anyway. In fact, sections of the aqueduct have respectable fishing for striped bass, which cannot easily tolerate the pollution of Chesapeake Bay or spawn in the freakish cross-Delta currents that the project pumps have caused, but which don’t seem to mind a three-hundred-foot lift in a pressurized elevator of water. This turbid, computer-controlled, concrete-walled river is the unlikeliest habitat imaginable for striped bass—as fitting a symbol of wild, fecund nature as one could find. The water project seems as make-believe as California itself, in its relentless quest to deny its desert heart.
Aside from lying about the true cost of the State Water Project, Pat Brown and his water resources chief, Bill Warne, had been less than candid about another matter of supreme importance: how much water the initial bonds would actually buy. Most Californians, it seems, believed they were buying four million acre-feet or more. But, as early as October of 1960, Joe Jensen had predicted that the bonds would never suffice to develop that much, and he was right. The initial facilities, it turned out, could deliver around 2.5 million acre-feet, perhaps three to three and a third million in wetter years—at least a million acre-feet less than the various cities and irrigation districts had signed up to buy. Meanwhile, population projections for southern California continued their horrifying march; in 1961, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was estimating that forty million people would live in the South Coast area by 1990. By February of 1962, Alfred Golze, Bill Warne’s chief engineer, was already calling for new reservoir construction on the North Coast as early as 1972; Warne himself said that “new reservoirs, dams, tunnels, and diversion projects must be undertaken somewhere in the North Coast area within the next twenty years.”
As it turned out, a splendid opportunity to do just that arrived sooner than Warne dared hope. In December of 1964, California was hit by floods that were even wilder than the great floods of 1955. In three days, from December 21 to 24, Blue Canyon on the American River recorded twenty inches of rain. All the rivers were roaring, from Big Sur to the Oregon border and beyond. But the river that rampaged most was the Eel. The Eel rose seventy-two feet from its bed. It snapped bridges with surgical precision; it uprooted three-hundred-foot red-woods; it swept fifty million board feet of timber out to sea—driftwood which, for the most part, is still piled along California’s beaches. At Scotia, near its mouth, the Eel was carrying the Mississippi River in a garment bag; 765,000 cubic feet of water were going by each second. Every town along the river was damaged—some were never seen again.