Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [289]
The idea was for several million acre-feet of water to be diverted from the Mississippi River below New Orleans—a point from where, presumably, Louisiana wouldn’t mind its being taken—and moved across the marshlands and swamp forests of the state in an aqueduct built to the dimensions of an airplane hangar. A river approaching the Colorado in size, running in reverse, the water would climb up to Dallas and Fort Worth, which sit at an elevation of 750 feet, by way of a series of stairstep reservoirs. A generous portion would head toward those two cities in a spur aqueduct; some of it would to to South Texas; but most of it would head toward Amarillo and Lubbock in the Trans-Texas Canal. There would be seventeen pumping stations en route lifting the water up the imperceptible slope of the plains; there would be nine terminal reservoirs waiting to receive it, Nearly a million acre-feet a year would be fed into the Pecos River; another half million would head toward Corpus Christi; 6,480,000 acre-feet would arrive on the Texas high plains, having climbed thirty-six hundred feet and traveled twelve hundred miles since New Orleans; 1.5 million acre-feet would perhaps go on to New Mexico. Two million acre-feet, the consumption of New York City and then some, would evaporate en route. It would take 6.9 million kilowatts of electricity to run it—about 40 percent of the electricity consumption of the entire state.
As a politician from a neighboring state put it after hearing the plan, “If those Texans can suck as hard as they can blow, they’ll probably build it.”
Without knowing anything but the vaguest outlines of the plan—without knowing whether the farmers could afford the water, whether its acid character was compatible with the plains’ alkaline soils, whether Texas water law didn’t exempt the farms from paying a dime once the water had percolated to the aquifer, whether the powerplants to move it could be financed and built, whether Louisiana had any intention of parting with one molecule of it—the voters of Texas suddenly found themselves, in August of 1969, being asked to appropriate $3.5 billion toward the Texas Water Plan’s construction. Actually, the question was couched much more circumspectly than that. The proponents of the measure, which became known as Amendment Two, insisted that the voters were merely being asked to guarantee $3.5 billion in bonds to establish a “repayable loan fund” which any city or region in the state could tap in order to meet its water needs—an argument which was greeted by the referendum’s opponents with cat-calls. The fact was, they said, that the Texas Water Development Board, which could arbitrarily and peremptorily decide who got how much of the money, was deeply committted to a rescue project for West Texas. Governor Preston Smith, who was trumping Amendment Two up and down the state, was a native of West Texas. If the hidden agenda wasn’t to build, or at least begin (since the $3.5 billion would never complete a project of such magnitude), the rescue project, why had the referendum been scheduled for August in an off-year election, when voter turnout was certain to be light, and organized elements behind the measure could affect the outcome much more dramatically than during a regular election year? The one place where turnout was likely to be heavy was in West Texas, because the farmers would be at home, busy with their crops, while a lot of East Texans would be off on vacation, escaping the humid heat. Why were the backers trying to distance themselves from the Texas Water Plan when that was the only plan that could absorb