Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [279]
“I kept telling the Bureau and Felix Sparks and Harris that I didn’t care if they built their dam or not,” Kuiper said. “But I’m the one who has to see to it that every irrigator gets the water he’s entitled to. Well, if the Bureau promises them ninety thousand acre-feet, and I can only deliver twenty thousand, I’m the one who gets blamed. I can’t give them ninety thousand unless I cut off others who have senior rights, and that’s illegal. The Bureau was making a bunch of outlandish promises and I was the one who was supposed to keep them.”
The Bureau, Dick Lamm, Felix Sparks, and Harris Sherman naturally refused to believe a word Kuiper said. Even so, his reputation was good enough, and his statements were colorful enough, that the newspapers listened to him, and soon the issue of channel losses—of the Bureau planning to build a $226 million project that might not be able to deliver water—was all over the local press. Sensing yet another impasse, the Bureau decided that it had better get someone else’s opinion. “Someone else” turned out to be Woodward-Clyde.
A huge engineering firm of considerable reputation, Woodward-Clyde has enjoyed a comfortable relationship of long standing with the Bureau. The Bureau often relies on Woodward-Clyde to perform independent assessments of its plans; then it often rewards it with lucrative construction contracts. It was no surprise, therefore, when Woodeard-Clyde’s estimate of channel losses in the Platte coincided nicely with the Bureau’s. Kuiper, however, continued to insist that both of them were wrong. “Their whole calculation was based on average annual channel losses,” he said. “Well, they may be right on an annualized basis, but an annualized basis doesn’t mean a damn thing. Most of those channel losses occur in the summertime, when the Platte Valley aquifer has been pumped out. That’s when it acts like it has a hole in it and the water going down the river just disappears into it. But summertime is when the Narrows customers are going to need their water. That’s the irrigation season. They’re going to call on it and it won’t get there.”
The Woodward-Clyde study was interesting in other respects, for it went on to examine the other questions that were being raised about the Narrows. It concluded that “a safe dam can be built at the Narrows site,” but, as Kuiper pointedly noted, declined to say at what cost. In stark contrast to the conclusions of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it said that the project “would have no adverse effect on sandhill cranes.” And even though, fifty miles away, the Badger and Beaver irrigation districts were pioneering an alternative to on-stream and off-stream reservoirs, groundwater storage, it concluded that groundwater storage was “not an economically feasible” alternative to the Narrows.
Nothing was more striking, however, than its conclusion that the Bureau’s claimed benefits for recreation “remain valid”—even though “primary production biomass in the reservoir will exceed levels that are usually indicative of eutrophy.” In that remarkable juxtaposition of irreconcilable conclusions, Woodward-Clyde was tacitly agreeing with the Environmental Protection Agency, which was convinced that Narrows Reservoir, touted by the Bureau as a fine new recreational “lake,” would quickly turn into a fetid, grossly polluted agricultural sump. Betwen the partially treated sewage of nearly two million people, the untreated runoff of hundreds of thousands of cows (some of them defecating right in the river), and pesticides and fertilizers washing in from thousand and thousands of acres of intensively farmed land—between this, and the fact that the reservoir would be shallow and warm, with