Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [268]
The Weldon Valley was settled in the 1870s, only forty years before the first proposal for a Narrows Dam; for most of its existence it has been threatened with extinction. Any day, any hour, someone might appear on one’s front lawn to survey; someone might amble up one’s walk with a sheaf of papers and an offer to sign or else. It is bad enough to live like this; it is worse to live under the shadow of a project as nonsensical as the Narrows Dam. And it becomes almost ludicrous if there is a distinct possibility that the dam, once built, may not hold water and could conceivably collapse, rendering seventy-five years of worry, agony, and divisiveness for naught. This has been Don Christenson’s fate since the day he was born.
The dam will be immense—an earthen monster. Twenty-two thousand four hundred feet long, it would stretch, if laid across Washington, D.C.—which is where Christenson suggests it ought to be built—from outer Georgetown to the Capitol. In New York, it would stretch from the Empire State Building to the Staten Island Ferry. For all its length, it would be only 147 feet high, and the reservoir behind it would be drawn down much of the time, which has prompted its critics to rename the project “the Shallows.” How anything this monumental—one of the largest dams on earth, longer even that the main dam of Itaipu, longer than Fort Peck—could be built for $226 million (the official cost estimate as of 1980) is anyone’s guess. Actually, a great part of that expenditure—probably half—wouldn’t even be used to build the dam. It would go to 844 landowners to pay compensation for the ninety-five farms, twenty-eight businesses, two churches, and elementary school that would be put underwater. It would also be used to relocate twenty-six miles of the Union Pacific’s track and twenty miles of State Route 144. The remainder of the money would somehow erect a four-mile-long dam.
The Narrows Reservoir would submerge fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand acres of productive, privately irrigated farmland, none of which has ever received the kind of subsidy the beneficiaries of Narrows would automatically get. (This is some of the oldest continuously irrigated land in the West; the Weldon Valley ditch was dug by human and horse muscle in 1881.) Another forty thousand acres of unirrigated grazing land would also be drowned or affected. Some local waterfowl habitat would be harmed, but the real damage to nature would be downstream. Flows in the hugely depleted South Platte, which are already critically low for the three-quarters of a million ducks and geese and the migrating whooping and sandhill cranes—the entire surviving U.S. population of whoopers—for which the river is a crucial feeding and resting spot, would be further reduced. Although the amount of water diverted would not be much—for a dam of such size and cost, it would be pathetic—its absence would be sorely felt by the waterfowl. On top of this, the concentration of fertilizers, pesticides, and sewage—Denver’s and Fort Collins’s—in the river would become worse.
The main benefit of building Narrows, on the other hand, would be supplemental irrigation water for 287,000 acres of land downstream from Don Christenson’s farm, most of it between the towns of Brush and Sterling. There would only be enough water for inches per acre, and one could reasonably question whether, during the occasional severe drought whose ravages Narrows is supposed to make less severe, so little water would do any real good. In fact, the continued profitability of the farms making up those 287,000