Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [269]
The high plains are home to some of the most freakish and violent weather in the world. Once, in Spearfish, South Dakota, thermometers leaped from two below to thirty-eight above zero in two minutes. A rutting ground for Canadian and Caribbean airflows, the plains are also known as tornado alley. Something like 90 percent of the world’s tornados occur in North America, most of them between the Rockies and the Mississippi River. A much more frequent natural phenomenon, however, is the tornado’s weaker sister, the hell-raising, rambunctious, exhilarating Great Plains thunderstorm.
One has to experience such a thunderstorm, preferably while lying scared to death in a ditch, to fathom the magnificent power of creation. In Texas, where the tropical flows are still saturated with moisture when they clash with colder air, a parade of thunderstorms dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours in the spring of 1978, far more rain than West Texas normally receives in a year. In Colorado, six- and seven-inch storms have been known on the plains, and since the natural groundcover is sparse, the flooding that results is spectacular. In 1964, such a flood occurred in the Bijou Creek watershed eighty miles east of Denver. Most of the time, Bijou Creek is less a creek than a dry wash; one has to search to find a puddle. During that storm, however, the Bijou became the second-largest river in the United States, carrying 465,000 cubic feet per second off the barren plains. Don Christenson was there. “It was the most unbelievable son of a bitch you ever saw,” he says. The Bijou rose in a few hours and was almost dry a day later: a phantom monster. But the damage downstream was done.
Bijou Creek enters the South Platte from the south, exactly at the site of Narrows Dam. Upriver, the Platte is well controlled; the main untamed tributary below Fort Collins, and the main cause of damage downstream, is Bijou Creek. The damsite is flexible enough so that one can more or less choose to put the dam in front of the Bijou confluence or behind it. If the dam goes in upstream from the Bijou confluence, obviously, most of the flood-control benefits are lost.
Originally, the Bureau was intent on capturing the Bijou behind Narrows Dam because the economics of the project would automatically improve: greater flood-control benefits could be claimed, and a much larger proportion of the dam’s cost would be nonreimbursable. Flood control, however, has always been the province of the Corps of Engineers, and the Corps, not the Bureau, would have to decide whether capturing the Bijou was worth it—or, for that matter, whether it was even safe to try to contain it.
The decision was to be made in 1965, shortly after Narrows was reauthorized by Congress and the Bureau began to push it seriously. On July 14, 1965, in a confidential letter to Commissioner Dominy, Pat Dugan, who had just left California to become the Bureau’s regional director in Denver, described his efforts to ensure a decision that controlling the Bijou was worthwhile. Having just attended a meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Dugan reported, “I stressed the necessity for an early answer from the Corps of Engineers on the benefits to be provided for control of Bijou Creek by extension of the dam. The Board strongly expressed themselves as being in favor of this facet of the Narrows Project, and I am confident that the Corps will be under continued pressure to provide the necessary answer” (emphasis added). Unfortunately for the Bureau, the pressure to provide the “necessary” answer came to naught. The Bijou flooded mightily, but it flooded most infrequently, the Corps decided, so controlling it wasn’t worth the extra cost. There was also some question as to whether another 450,000-cfs flood might not take out the dam.
With most of its flood-control rationale gone, Narrows went into eclipse during the remainder of the 1960s.