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By Root 1433 0

Secretary of the Interior J. A. Krug sign a contract whereby the tribe sells 155,000 acres of its reservation’s best land in North Dakota to the government for the Garrison Dam and Reservoir Project on May 20, 1948. Gillette said of the sale: “The members of the Tribal Council sign the contract with heavy hearts.... Right now. the future does not look good to us.” (AP-Wide World Photos)

For more than fifty years, the tiny man-made river in the foreground, the Granite Reef Aqueduct of the Central Arizona Project, has been viewed by Arizonans as the one thing that can save them from oblivion. In the next century, however, as seven states suck up their full share of the feckless and overappropriated Colorado River, the aqueduct may run as empty as the diversion canal on the right. (Bureau of Reclamation)

Teton Dam, just as the flood abated. Hours earlier, the flow of four Mississippi Rivers was thundering through the breach. The big concrete structure on the left is the spillway, whose outlet works hadn’t been completed and which couldn’t be used to begin emptying the reservoir when the first signs of trouble appeared. The height from river level to the crest of the remnant of the dam is about thirty stories; at the spot from which the photo was taken, boiling waves were more than one hundred feet high. (Bureau of Reclamation)

The remains of Teton Dam, as seen from the air, hours after the flood. (Bureau of Reclamation)

The three main antagonists in the Narrows Dam controversy. To Colorado Governor Richard Lamm (AT LEFT) the dam was an offer he couldn’t refuse. To water lawyer Glenn Saunders (BELOW, LEFT) the dam symbolized a spendthrift society clinging to obsolete hopes. Former Colorado State Engineer C. J. Kuiper (BELOW, RIGHT) still believes the dam could fail catastrophically, as Teton did

A section of the spillway at Glen Canyon Dam completely destroyed by raging floodwaters spilled during the very wet EI Niño winter of 1982—83. Although the Glen Canyon spillways run directly beneath the dam through rock that is mainly sandstone, the Bureau of Reclamation insists that the structure itself was never threatened. (Bureau of Reclamation)

OPPOSITE, ABOVE: The desert blooms on the Gila Project near Yuma, Arizona. Not far from here the Hohokam, one of the world’s great irrigated civilizations, went extinct. (Bureau of Reclamation)

OPPOSITE. BELOW: The Control Room of the California Water Project, where the man-made now of nearly a trillion gallons a year is orchestrated. (© Peter Menzel, 1986)

The California Aqueduct winds through Lost Hills, turning nearby desert, once considered worthless, into a billion-dollar agricultural bonanza. (© Peter Menzel, 1986)

The Wind Gap pumps, which send water from the Feather River over the 3,400-foot summit of the Tehachapi Range, consume the electrical output of a nuclear power plant and stand between Los Angeles and disaster. (© Peter Menzel, 1986)

Mono Lake, an inland sea in eastern California desert country, is slowly dying. Most of the water that used to flow into the lake is now being diverted and piped to Los Angeles, three hundred miles away. As the lake’s depth has decreased, natural calcium format ions called tufa towers have been exposed. (© Peter Menzel, 1986)

Salt deposits cover ruined farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. A million acres in California alone may ultimately be affected. (© Peter Menzel, 1986)