Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [233]
The Christmas flood—the second “hundred-year” flood in just nine years—had Brown, Warne, and the Army Corps of Engineers issuing statements expressing profound dismay while they privately rubbed their hands with glee. Within months, the Corps, the Bureau, and the Department of Water Resources had locked arms as the State-Federal Interagency Task Force, ready, once and for all, to choke California’s untamed rivers into submission. Every river on the North Coast, except the Smith and the Klamath, was to get at least one big dam; the various forks of the Eel were to get eight. But the Bureau and the Corps kept getting into scraps over who was to build what first, and Pat Brown’s term was running out, so, one by one, the dams fell into obscurity. By 1966, when Ronald Reagan became governor, the only dam in which strong interest was still being expressed was the largest, Dos Rios, on the Middle Fork of the Eel. With twice the storage capacity of Shasta Lake, Dos Rios was the ideal addition to the State Water project; it could deliver another 900,000 acre-feet, almost enough to bring the total yield, in normal years, up to the 4,230,000 acre-feet the state had promised to deliver. The site was reasonably close to the Central Valley; all one had to do was dig a twenty-one-mile tunnel through the Yolla Bolly Mountains and dump the water into Stony Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento.
Dos Rios had three things going against it, though the Eel had acquired such a black reputation that none seemed likely to prevent its being built. One was the fact that it would do nothing to control the Eel. During the Christmas flood, more than 500,000 cubic feet per second had poured out of the South and North forks and the main Eel, which would all remain undammed. What did it matter if one’s house was under twelve feet of water or eleven feet four inches? Those eight inches at Scotia were the sum total of the flood crest that Dos Rios would contain; a local rancher, Richard Wilson, who had a degree in agricultural engineering from Dartmouth, proved it, and the Corps could only wish him wrong.
Another drawback was that the reservoir would drown an Indian reservation and the town of Covelo—population two thousand—but that sort of thing had been done many times before. (The Corps had included the flooding of the reservation in its benefit-cost analysis, but had it down as a benefit because the Indians would get a “nicer” town somewhere else.) The third drawback was that the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t particularly interested.
Reagan, as a westerner, should have been a friend of dams, but he was growing more conservative by the hour, and true conservatives tend to dislike great public works. He also distrusted the Corps of Engineers—a feeling which the Corps, if anything, seemed to reinforce. Reagan’s resources secretary, Norman Livermore, remembers asking the Corps to do two cost-benefit analyses—one using the 3¼ percent interest rate which the Corps planned to use, the other using the 6¼ percent rate that reflected economic reality. “When they gave it to me,” remembers Livermore, “I looked at the two columns, and the bottom line was exactly the same. I took it into a cabinet meeting and really got a laugh.”
For four and a half years, Reagan stalled on Dos Rios while the water lobby was practically battering down his door. The head of his Department of Water Resources, Bill Gianelli, a short, square man with a Vince Lombardi temperament and an American flag perpetually stuck in his lapel, was, according to Richard Wilson—who was the leader of the ragtag opposition—an “absolute zealot” in favor of building the dam. So was Don Clausen, the Republican Congressman representing the North Coast. But Wilson was a friend of Norman Livermore’s, and Livermore had Reagan’s ear. According to Wilson, when the governor realized he finally had to say yes or no, he asked Livermore to give