Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [249]
Pat Dugan essentially agrees. “There hasn’t been an ideal damsite since 1940,” he says. “Every site we’ve built on since then would probably have scared hell out of a nineteenth-century engineer. But you wouldn’t feel safe going a hundred miles per hour in a Model T, either, if you could get it going that fast down a hill. You might feel perfectly safe in a Porsche.” That might be true, except that the dams built at less than ideal locations are usually larger than those built at the earlier, better sites, and with so many dams now in place one dam’s failure could conceivably cause other dams to fail, resulting in a domino of disasters unlike anything the country has ever seen. The failure of one large, strategically placed dam (Glen Canyon, for example, which would surely take out Hoover as it went) could undo much of what the Bureau of Reclamation has built up over seventy years, leaving southern California a desert underwater and the economy of the Southwest in ruins.
A modest version of that is what might have happened when Teton Dam collapsed. What actually happened was bad enough.
When Bob Curry got his first look at a cross section of the Teton damsite, his reaction was much like Pat Dugan’s when he looked at his finished cross section of Fontenelle. “Holy Christ!” Curry, a geologist, remembers thinking to himself. “What a terrible site for a dam!” By then, however, the dam was already one-quarter completed.
The French colonizers of what is now Chad informally divided their hollow prize into two separate nations. The south was Chad utile— “useful Chad”—and the north was Chad inutile. In the south, which delved into the fringes of the Central African rainbelt, you could raise a crop; there was wildlife. Northern Chad was deep in the Sahara, as barren as Antarctica. One’s first impression af Idaho is much the same, only the polarity is reversed. Northern Idaho is green and welcoming; it is beautiful. Close enough to the Pacific to be influenced by its storehouse of winter warmth, mountainous enough to wring moisture out of passing weather, northern Idaho is the banana belt of the Rockies—warmer than the mountains of New Mexico a thousand miles to the south, wetter than eastern Oregon and Washington to the West. Wild rivers pour out of the mountains—the Salmon, the Clearwater, the Lochsa, the Boise, the Pend Oreille. Apple and cherry orchards thrive in the valleys. In the middle is a vast wilderness, the Salmon River breaks—the most expansive roadless area in the coterminous United States.
Northern Idaho, however, doesn’t count much in the economic scheme of things. Real Idaho, serious-minded Idaho, is in the south, along the desolate reaches of the Snake River’s old volcanic plain. Like barnacles on an anchor chain, Idaho’s cities, its most productive farmland, and much of its wealth are strung along the Snake as it loops around the southern half of the state. Thanks to irrigation, it is a useless place made rich; nowhere except in Arizona and California’s Central Valley has such an utter transformation been wrought in the West. Twenty miles from either side of the Snake there is little but desert, and more desert, and rockpiles of basaltic tuff. It was exactly this sort of landscape that appealed to early Mormons, who found a place attractive in exact proportion to its ability to repel anyone else. Drifting up from Salt Lake Basin, the Mormons glimpsed the Snake, incongruously big in the desert, and immediately saw a future. Diverting the few smaller streams, they made a tentative beachhead; then the Bureau of Reclamation arrived and built Jackson Lake and Minidoka and American Falls dams, and the beachhead became an invasion. Within the forty-mile corridor along the Snake River now exists an irrigation economy that has given Idaho a higher percentage of millionaires than any other state in the nation. The best-known