Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [246]
Having said that, Brown suggested another motive that had made him, a northern Californian by birth, want so badly to build a project which would send a lot of northern California’s water southward: “Some of my advisers came to me and said, ‘Now governor, don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water. That’s a desert down there. Ecologically, it can’t sustain the number of people that will come if you bring the water project in there.’
“I weighed this very, very thoughtfully before I started going all out for the water project. Some of my advisers said to me, ‘Yes, but people are going to come to southern California anyway.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, send them up to northern California.’ I knew I wouldn’t be governor forever. I didn’t think I’d ever come down to southern California and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want all these people to go to northern California.’ ”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Those Who Refuse to Learn ...
Early in September of 1965, the Bureau of Reclamation’s newest dam, Fontenelle, on the Green River in southwestern Wyoming, sprang a leak. A big leak.
Eighteen years later, Pat Dugan remembered it as vividly as if it had been yesterday. Dugan was then regional director in Denver; he was the person who held the keys to the Bureau’s airplane. “Barney Bellport, the chief engineer, called me up at four A.M.,” Dugan remembers. “He said, ‘We’ve got to get that plane in the air quick. We’ve got a dam that’s about to go.’ Barney was a self-confident guy—a little bit of an arrogant bastard—so I figured if he was worried, we were in plenty of trouble. We were.”
Fontenelle was an earthen dam of moderate size on a troublesome site; it stored water for the Seedskadie Project. That the site had geologic problems was apparent from the very beginning, but the Bureau, as it would in a number of cases, built it anyway, for the simple reason that it was running out of good places to erect its dams. “I think I was the first person who ever did up a detailed cross section of that site,” Dugan remembers. “I didn’t like it from the beginning. The left abutment was fine, but for some reason we had a lot of trouble with the right one. It was shaly and just generally lousy. I figured it would take a lot of grout.” Asked what he thought of the Seedskadie Project itself, Dugan said, “It was one of the few lemons we could find in Wyoming that didn’t make your mouth pucker completely shut.”
Wyoming has had its share of powerful politicians in recent decades, from Senator Joseph O‘Mahoney, who stopped FDR’s plan to pack the Supreme Court, to Senator Gale McGee, Lyndon Johnson’s most articulate ally on the subject of Vietnam. What the economy of their high, harsh, hot, arid, and bitterly cold state could not produce on its own, they could produce for it out of the national treasury. The growing season in the region is extremely short: the altitude of most agricultural land is between four thousand and seven thousand feet, and there is frost nine months of the year, sometimes even in August. The land is useless for growing anything but cattle browse. To build an expensive dam, a spillway, an outlet works, and canals in order to grow grass or alfalfa is not generally an economically rewarding proposition. It can, however, be a politically rewarding one. To paraphrase what someone said about pleasure and pain, economics are an illusion, while politics are real. Besides, as Wyoming’s politicians never