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The Sierra Club received considerable criticism this fall after its president, Adam Werbach, proposed that the government consider opening Glen Canyon Dam and draining Lake Powell.
The benefits would include more available water in the arid Southwest, since Lake Powell loses more more from evaporation than it gains by storage. It also traps sediment that once built beaches in the Grand Canyon, and the reservoir cools the Colorado River to the detriment of endangered native warm-water fish.
Removing the dam is hardly an original idea.
I first saw it twenty years ago in an essay by Edward Abbey, who bemoaned the loss of the gorgeous canyon now inundated, as well as the consequent industrialization of what had been wholesome, challenging, and useless desert. The remnants of the dam, he suggested, should be named Floyd Dominy Falls, after the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation when the dam was built in 1960-64.
For my part, when I finally visited Page, Ariz., in March of 1996 during the artificial flood, I was prepared to despise the dam, like a good Abbey fan.
But instead, after riding to the bottom where I could gaze up at its immensity, as the huge generators throbbed and great jets of high-pressure water plumed out toward the river, well, I felt rather proud to be of a species that could even imagine such a project, let alone build it and keep it running.
Perhaps the West's congressional delegations felt the same way, though they expressed it differently: just the usual denunciations of absurd schemes from tree-hugger idealists who aren't real Westerners, or they'd understand how important it is to balance the federal budget while continuing federal subsidies for anything that might benefit real-estate development in the West.
Further, what point is there in building this huge dam -- 710 feet high, 4,901,000 cubic yards of concrete, 27,000,000 acre-feet of storage -- at a cost of 272 million pre-inflation 1964 dollars, only to tear it out just a few decades later?
That sounds like a good question, but it's one that no Western representative or senator should ask. The history of this part of the world is pretty much a story of building things at tremendous expense (from the public treasury if possible, but from private sources if necessary) and then abandoning them.
Within an afternoon drive from Salida, I can easily find at least $272 million in wasted capital spending -- that is, money invested in projects which looked like good ideas at the time, but are now abandoned or mothballed.
At the top of Frémont Pass, for instance, sits the Climax Molybdenum Mine, where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the past 75 years -- and the only current activity is in the water-treatment plant. Even during the Shining Times, private enterprise was just as talented at waste as government -- a $20 million oxide-recovery mill opened with great fanfare, only to be scrapped within the decade.
All around here are old railroad routes -- Marshall Pass, Trout Creek Pass, Alpine Tunnel, Hagerman Tunnel -- that good men died to build and operate. Right through town, there are rails, laid and maintained at tremendous cost over the past 117 years, which the Union Pacific Railroad plans to abandon -- more millions down some rathole in the West.
For that matter, the Union Pacific was itself the result of federal subsidies right after the Civil War. The idea was to move goods across the continent. At last report, the UP was hopelessly snarled, unable to do the job that it was created to do -- more millions, perhaps even billions, wasted in the West.
What of all those abandoned silver mines and smelters, built when the federal government subsidized silver mining, discarded after the subsidies quit in 1893? Or more recently, the toxic residues of a uranium boom financed 50 years ago by the taxpayers of this great republic?
Or the nuclear-weapon fabrication plants and facilities -- Hanford, Rocky Flats, Los Alamos, Yucca Flat -- billions of dollars invested in the West, all worse than useless now?
Go as far back as we want -- even a millenium, to Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde -- and we find little but ruins from vast investments which later turned sour.
By those standards, $272 million Glen Canyon Dam is a mere drop in the bucket, another one of those propositions which seemed like a good idea at the time, but didn't turn out quite so well.
As I mentioned, I was awed by Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, so I'd be just as happy if they stayed in place.
But if it turns out that the dam wasn't such a good idea after all, it wouldn't be the first time. Considering how the West teems with ruins of everything from cliff houses to missile silos, with forlorn farmsteads and decaying ghost towns, Floyd Dominy Falls would fit perfectly in this land of expensive failures.
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