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By Root 1693 0

West Texans. Mahon came from Lubbock and was old enough to remember it as a one-horse town. “He had a fear that things could return to that,” Casey remembers. “It haunted him.” As Casey expected, the conversation immediately came around to the Texas Water Plan. “He asked me what my gut reaction was,” Casey remembers. “Did I think it would fly? I told him, ‘I hate to tell you this frankly, but my gut reaction is that it’s crazy.’ I’ll never forget the look on his face. It was like I was a doctor telling him his daughter was going to die.” Casey’s pessimism notwithstanding, Mahon was adamant about studying the plan. He even had an amendment ready for the appropriations bill giving the Bureau whatever money it needed to perform a feasibility report. “I told him that a feasibility report on a plan this big was going to consume a hell of a lot of man-hours and money. But I told him if he insisted we’d do it, because this plan made more sense to me than some of the other cockamamie ideas that were floating around. If it turned out to be infeasible, then we’d all better get ready to kiss irrigation on the high plains goodbye.”

The figures Casey’s staff began toting up over the next three years were appalling. Routing the aqueduct across wet Louisiana and southeastern Texas would be a costly nightmare, even if the Bureau didn’t have to pay for bodyguards to protect its construction crews. “The Louisiana legislature told us to go ahead and study it, because the numbers would kill us anyway,” Casey remembers. “But if we’d actually gone ahead and tried to build the thing God knows what might have happened. I felt like taking out a new life insurance policy before going into the bayous down there.” The aqueduct would have to go underneath four major rivers by siphon; 142 minor streams would be siphoned under it. But what encumbered the Mississippi diversion most of all was its gluttonous appetite for energy. “Carry two buckets of water up the Washington Monument, take the elevator back down, and do it five more times. That was the lift we had to overcome to West Texas. We were talking billions of buckets. We were talking trillions of buckets,” says Casey. There was not nearly enough surplus power in Texas, so the project would have to build its own generating plants. The Bureau decided to go the nuclear route, on the widely held belief that nuclear electricity would soon be dirt-cheap. “We took the most pie-eyed projections we could find from the Atomic Energy Commission. We figured the plants would cost $250 million apiece. The plan required about twelve of them. Twelve nuclear plants of a million kilowatts each. You couldn’t build one nuclear plant in 1985 for the price we thought we were going to pay for twelve in 1971.”

Notwithstanding power price estimates that were beyond the realm of fantasy, the Texas Water Plan—which, in the Bureau’s version, was somewhat larger than Texas’s own—would consume $325 million worth of power every year, in 1971 dollars. The West Texas farmers would end up with a water bill of $330 an acre-foot, all because of the relentless upslope of the plains. The most they could possibly pay, the Bureau decided, was $125 (“and that was hocus-pocus,” says Casey). Taxpayers, therefore, would subsidize the rest. The benefit-cost ratio ultimately worked out to .27 to 1.00—for every dollar invested, there would be twenty-seven cents’ worth of economic return. “The disparity between primary benefits and costs is so great that there is no reasonable prospect that any plan for transporting Mississippi River water to West Texas or eastern New Mexico would [become] favorable,” the Bureau’s report read. And it continued, “It is unlikely that the project described ... could be completed in time to prevent virtual cessation of groundwater irrigation on the Texas High Plains and large-scale reduction of such irrigation in eastern New Mexico.” If there was any justification for it at all, it was that “the project could contribute significantly to population dispersion in the 21st century, if this becomes a national objective.