Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [322]
“On the whole I find more interest in the idea than opposition,” said Robert Bourassa.
“I view the prospect with enthusiasm,” said Brian Mulroney, Canada’s new Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, the people of northern Quebec—mainly Cree Indians—are seeing their culture disintegrate under the waters of monstrous reservoirs being erected by the $35 billion James Bay Hydroelectric Project, which is selling power—though not yet water—to the United States.
“I don’t think the people of the province would stand for it,” said Frank Miller, the premier of neighboring Ontario.
Afterword to the Revised Edition
In 1978, the year I moved to San Francisco to begin writing this book, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse rode off into a bowl of heat and dust and the Sixth flashed in on a flood. The previous water year—which, in California, runs from October to the following September—had been the driest since recordkeeping began; water year 1976 had been the third driest. But late in 1977 the skies miraculously opened, and water year 1978 ended up as one of the wettest on record. It was a first act. By February of 1979, spillways were roaring at dams whose reservoirs had almost gone dry two years before. In 1980, the third year in a row categorized as “very wet,” the jet stream, carrying storms like aircraft in a landing pattern at O’Hare, took aim at southern California, and for weeks the Los Angeles River was so swollen with runoff there was talk of building an aqueduct to send it north.
Then came the really big water years, the El Nino winters of 1982 and 1983. No one fully understands why the ocean warms during El Niño episodes—vast climatic oscillations are involved—and you can’t safely predict the result, but strong El Niños tend to coincide with heavy precipitation years. The early Eighties El Niño was the sharpest warming on record. The first huge storm hit the California coast just after Christmas in 1982. Winds over Mount Tamalpais, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, blew a hundred and ten miles an hour, and, after a truck tumbled onto its side, the bridge itself was closed for only the second time since it was built. The thousands of gouges, slumps, and landslide tracks that you see in the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay were mostly caused by that storm, which dumped more rain in an hour than parts of California ordinarily see in a year. During the following winter, superstorms such as this were routine. In the Sierra Nevada, the standing snowfall record of 750 inches, set in 1906, was eclipsed by fifteen feet. Yosemite Valley was underwater. The storms, bloated with subtropical moisture that seemed to be flash-evaporating from the ocean, were not wrung out, as they usually are, by the Sierra-Cascade blockade. Mirages in Nevada and Utah filled with real water; the Great Salt Lake flooded highways miles from its fleeing shore. The Colorado River at spring melt was unofficially gauged at 350,000 cubic feet per second; that was the flood that damaged the spillway directly under Glen Canyon Dam and—by washing in millions of cubic yards of silt—hastened Lake Powell’s ongoing metamorphosis from reservoir to farmland.
The El Niño episode played itself out by 1985, and the weather returned to normal for a year or two, until, on Valentine’s Day in 1986—just as this book first went to press—one of the three biggest California storms since the turn of the century decided to make landfall.
I was in a Santa Monica hotel room when the frontal system approached the coast. I awakened to a radio weatherman in midsentence, saying something about an electronic buoy a few dozen miles offshore that was sending in low-pressure readings such as you measure inside the eye of a hurricane. I scrapped my plans and decided to flee for home. The ocean below my window was all whitecaps and tremendous