Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [89]
“Enthusiastically” is a bit of an understatement. The beauty of river-basin “accounting,” from the Bureau’s point of view, was that it would be literally forced to build dams. The engineering mentality which, Robinson himself admits, came to dominate the Bureau’s thinking in the 1930s and 1940s created an institutional distaste for irrigation projects. They were a necessary nuisance that provided the rationale for what Bureau men really loved to do: build majestic dams. In the past, however, the infeasibility of many projects put a damper on their ambitions, because if a project didn’t make economic sense, they lost the rationale they needed to build a dam to store water. With river-basin accounting, the equation was stood on its head: a lot of bad projects—economically infeasible ones—created a rationale for building more, not fewer, dams. The dams—all with hydroelectric features, of course—would be required to compensate for the financial losses of the irrigation projects; the losses would miraculously vanish in the common pool of revenues.
River-basin “accounting,” then, was a perversion of a sensible idea—that idea being to plan the “orderly” (a favorite Bureau word) development of a river basin from headwaters to mouth. But even if it subverted logic, economics, and simple common sense, it was essential to the Bureau’s survival as an institution and to the continued expansion of irrigation in the high, arid West. On the other hand, it was something akin to a blanket death sentence for the free-flowing rivers in sixteen states.
What the upper basin of the Colorado lacked, because of its elevation, in feasible irrigation projects it more than made up—for the same reason—in sites for cash register dams. High and mountainous, geologically young, the basin had deep valleys and tight plunging gorges ideal for dams—gorges in which ran rivers that fed the main Colorado and could be included, under the bizarre new logic of river-basin accounting, in any grand basinwide scheme. The rivers, draining arid and semiarid regions, may not have held much runoff, but a very high dam on a small river can yield as much hydroelectricity as a low dam on a much larger one; that is the beauty of what dam engineers call hydrologic head: velocity of falling water does the work of volume, of mass. There was Glen Canyon on the main-stem Colorado, Powell’s favorite riverine haunt, an ideal site for a six-hundred-foot dam. There was Flaming Gorge on the Green, and Red Canyon—each a perfect site for a gigantic curved-arch, thin-wall dam approaching Hoover in size. There was the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, an almost sheer thousand-foot gorge with several sites for high dams. The Dolores, the Yampa, the White, even smaller streams like the Animas and San Miguel and Little Snake—each had at least one site for a cash register dam. Since the dams would have to be large compared to the meager river flows, they would be expensive to build. But that wouldn’t matter; the Bureau had the Treasury at its disposal.
All the upper basin needed, then, was Congressional clout—that, and a Reclamation Commissioner who believed in dams for dams’ sake. And it was the upper basin’s further good fortune that, near the end of his third term, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint such a man as his Commissioner of Reclamation. His name was Michael Straus.
Mike Straus was the unlikeliest commissioner the Bureau ever had. For one thing, he was an easterner; for another, he was a newspaperman. On top of that, he was rich. By temperament, Straus was an exact opposite of the slide-rule engineers who had guided the Bureau during its forty-odd years. He was an anomaly down to his very genes. Straus had married into the Dodge family, and his brother-in-law