Cadillac Desert (70 page)

The impetus, as in the case of many dams, was disaster, or what was called disaster—first a drought, then a flood. The drought occurred in 1961 and 1962, the flood the winter after. The flood caused some few hundred thousand dollars worth of damage, most of it because ice jams occurred at a couple of bridges during a sudden early melt. The drought was mainly a misnomer, nothing like the early thirties or the drastic rainless period in California in the mid-1970s; farm income remained high. In the West, however, a drought and a flood together set off a strong Pavlovian response. The first thing that enters anyone’s mind is a dam.

For a project that had spent three or four decades in the pupa stage, Teton was authorized and built in a great hurry. The main reason was Willis Walker, a crotchety Mormon farmer and president of the Fremont-Madison Irrigation District, who managed to organize all of southwestern Idaho behind it. His task was not that difficult. This, after all, was the Mormon West. The closest thing to oppositoin was indifference. years later, speaking with a reporter, Walker reminisced, “One of the arguments we used back there was that in ‘60 and ’61 we had a lot of potatoes and a lot of sugar beets around here that didn’t have enough water to finish them out. I figured I had better find that water or quit farming.” The argument conjured images of crops wilting on the vine, of families ruined on the eve of harvest for want of water to bring their crops to ripeness. Everyone bought it, even though it was nonsense, for the most part. Years later, a graduate student writing a thesis discovered that production of some crops had actually
increased
during the drought. In Fremont and Madison counties, for example, the yield of potatoes in 1961, the worst year of the drought, was 212 hundredweight per acre. Between 1956 and 1959, a stretch of more or less normal years, the average yield was only 184 hundredweight per acre.

Even had the drought threatened ruin, there was a solution much simpler and cheaper than a dam, the same solution that California’s farmers would fall back on during their far more apocalyptic drought of 1976 and 1977: groundwater. Idaho may have more groundwater in storage than any other state except Alaska. The Snake River Aquifer, lying directly beneath the Teton River, is still prodigious. During the 1960s, when the drought occurred, thousands of pumps were already operating, supplementing the diversion ditches. Pumping, of course, can be expensive, especially if one’s crops require nine or ten feet of water a year. The answer then might be to grow something that requires less water, or to install more efficient irrigation systems. But the farmers of Fremont and Madison counties, good upstanding Mormon conservatives, wanted things their way—and they wanted the descendants of the people who had chased them out of Ohio and Illinois and Iowa to pay 90 percent of the cost. “Mormons get burned up when they read about someone buying a bottle of mouthwash with food stamps,” says Russell Brown, one of the dam’s most persistent critics. “But they love big water projects. They only object to nickel-and-dime welfare. They love it in great big gobs.”

With the entire Congressional delegation from Idaho behind the dam, authorization was a snap, and in the later years the appropriations came fast and furious. However, the project had a little trouble getting going; it received only $3 million during the first six years following authorization, probably as a result of the Vietnam War. During that same period, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the Bureau was forced for the first time to make a public assessment of the environmental effects of its new dams. Before it learned to flood its critics with a tide of ink, the Bureau merely went through the motions of writing an environmental-impact statement; in the case of Teton, it ran to fourteen pages and didn’t say much of anything. The exercise, however, drew some attention to the project; both the
Idaho Statesman,
the state’s preeminent newspaper, and the Idaho Environmental Council began to take a closer look at it, and liked little that they saw. Published in Boise, on the other side of the state, the
Statesman
could afford to be objective, but even had the project been next door, the paper’s maverick young editor, Ken Robison, was not the sort who parrots the views of the local Chamber of Commerce. The Environmental Council, which included a number of scientists from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Testing Station at Idaho Falls, was unusually sophisticated for a tiny organization, and fed Robison a steady diet of statistics worked out on a federal computer.

The statistics, on their face, were quite damaging. The project benefits had been calculated by the Bureau on the basis of the worst drought on record, outrageously stacking the deck in the project’s favor. The figures it used to calculate the annual value of flood prevention were about 200 percent higher than historical losses to floods. Of the thirty-seven thousand “new” acres to be opened to irrigation, twenty thousand acres were
already
being irrigated by groundwater pumping; the project would simply substitute surface water for sprinklers, which is a lot different from bringing new land into production.

No statistic, however, was as startling as one freely provided by the Bureau itself. According to its own report, on the 111,000 already cultivated acres that were to receive supplemental water from the Teton project, the average annual irrigation amounted to 132
inches;
the project would simply give the farmers, on the average, another five. One hundred and thirty-two inches is five times the annual rainfall of farmland in Iowa; it is ten times what prudent farmers in the Ogallala region of arid West Texas put on their crops. It is the precipitation of tropical forests. In fact, according to the Bureau, a common method of irrigating on the Rexford benchlands is subirrigation, which means literally what it implies: water is dumped on the ground in such prodigious quantities that the water table rises up into the root zones of the crops. In one of the driest zones of North America, the Bureau was going to sell dirt-cheap irrigation water to irrigators practicing the equivalent of hydroponic gardening.

The Teton project could be justified only by using an interest, or discount, rate of 3¼ percent. Even with that rate, which was unrealistic in the hyperinflationary 1970s, the best it could manage was a benefit-cost ration of 1.2 to 1. After getting rid of the phony flood-control figures, the phony “new” irrigated land, and the more implausible fish and wildlife and recreation benefits, the Idaho Environmental Council came up with a benefit-cost ratio of .73 to 1.00. Using a 6 percent discount rate, which was more realistic, the ratio dropped to .41 to 1. Taking, for the sake of compromise, the midway point between the Environmental Council’s more flattering figure and the Bureau’s, the Teton project was exactly worthless as an investment of tax dollars: it would destroy a beautiful river for the sake of nothing in return.

Such arguments, persuasive though they might have been in an objective sense, seemed only to solidify the local support for Teton Dam. Since Willis Walker had won authorization for the project, the man who emerged as its chief propagandist was Ben Plastino, the political editor of the local newspaper, the Idaho Falls Post-Register. Plastino was the sort of small-town editor Twain or Mencken would have loved. It wasn’t just his appearance, though that certainly helped. He was short, middle-aged, and pudgy, and his sartorial tastes ran to combat clashes of checks and plaids—vivid figurine shirts, loud polyester ties, acetate houndstooth-checked pants, multicolor Dacron-polyester jackets. Plastino felt a newspaper had two important roles. One was to bring as much federal money as possible into its region, especially in the form of a dam. The other was to rail against big government and creeping socialism. One senator’s immortal words during the Watergate hearings—“Don’t confuse me with the facts”—were words Ben Plastino had gratefully taken to heart. As recently as 1979, he insisted that Teton was primarily a flood-control project (it wasn’t, or it would have been built by the Corps of Engineers), maintained that none of the farmers put anywhere near ten feet of water on their crops (some used up to thirteen), and insisted that every water project pays for itself, regardless of cost.

The
Post-Register
was magnanimous enough to publish an occasional letter opposing the dam, but in its news stories the opposition was usually referred to as “extreme environmentalists.” Covering one meeting of dam supporters, Plastino wrote obsequiously about their efforts in behalf of Teton, describing the “warm thanks” and “warm applause” that greeted each self-congratulatory testimonial. The paper, however, was a lot more objective than some of its readers. “Those who would cramp and belittle America’s dream and who labor to stalemate needed natural development,” stated one letter to the newspaper, “have plans for a singularly small and feeble nation, a blueprint for weakening our nation in a time when enemy nations are straining to develop their resources and strengths.” Another asked, “I for one would like to know who is the power behind these so-called environmentalists? Why are they so radical about condemning anything that would improve Idaho’s irrigation?”

Jerry Jayne, who was then president of the Idaho Environmental Council, hardly looks like the communist many of his neighbors seemed to think he was. Crew-cut, strong-jawed, erect as a cabinet, he bears a strong resemblance to Mike Nomad, in the Steve Roper comic strip, and one might expect to find him at the controls of a nuclear power plant—which is exactly where one would find him, since he works for the Department of Energy’s nuclear testing facility at Idaho Falls. “I don’t know what it is about these Mormon irrigation farmers,” Jayne said. “I can talk to the loggers, I can talk to the ranchers. I can talk to the mining companies. I can say nothing to the irrigation farmers. They’re not reasonable. They don’t listen. They’re true believers.
They’re
like communists—only in reverse.”

Idaho has had one of the most convulsive recent geologic histories of any state. Only a few million years ago, it was an almost continuous cataclysm of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and lava flows. The Yellowstone plateau, two hundred miles off to the northwest, still exhibits the remnants of such activity, as do the Cascade Ranges to the West. (In the fall of 1983, one of the biggest earthquakes in recent U.S. history struck a remote part of Idaho less than two hundred miles from the Teton site.) The whole eastern Snake River Plain, including the Teton site, is a vast bed of basaltic rock. The hazards of building a dam in such terrain, however, became an issue almost entirely by accident. In 1973, Robert Curry was teaching geology at the University of Montana; he did some occasional consulting work for the Sierra Club, mostly on the effects of logging and mining operations. Though he was quite familiar with the geological firmament of southern Idaho, and knew it was anything but firm, he always assumed the Bureau knew how to build a safe dam in such a locale. He also assumed it would have the sense not to build one at an absolutely terrible site. “The first time I heard anyone question the safety of Teton Dam,” Curry remembers, “is when some people with the Idaho Environmental Council called me up in 1973. They had been sitting around drinking beer with some guys from the Geologic Survey and one of the Survey guys said—I guess he didn’t even mean to let it out—‘Well, the Bureau’s going to have a hell of a time building Teton Dam.’ An IEC member asked him what he meant, and the Survey guy said, ‘Well, it’s really a crummy spot to put a dam.’ I was one of the few geologists around who had much sympathy for the environmental side, so they called me up and asked me what I knew. I didn’t know anything. I figured, well, they’d built American Falls Dam down there and some other ones, so they must know what they’re doing. But I asked the Survey if I could see their cross section anyway. I looked at it and that’s when I said, ‘Holy Christ!’

“The stuff they were going to build the dam on—all those ashflows and rhyolitic rock—may look solid to you, but it’s really a veneer, sort of like the wood veneer on a cheap desk. It’s brittle, it’s cracked. It could peel off just like the veneer on the desk. They were going to scrape away the worst of it and then say that they were anchoring the dam in bedrock. But it isn’t really what most geologists would call bedrock. The dam was not going to have a true bedrock foundation.

“It was such an obviously lousy site to a trained geologist,” Curry added, “it makes you wonder what happens to human judgment inside a bureaucracy.”

Accompanying the Geologic Survey’s schematic of the Teton foundation was a report to the Bureau of Reclamation written by four geologists in its regional office, which—in its first version—raised “certain questions about the fundamental safety of the Teton Dam.... Despite the incompleteness of the data,” the geologists cautioned, “we fell obliged to bring them to your attention now, while they may still be useful and on the chance that some factors may not have been adequately considered in design of the project.”

From reading the memorandum, it was clear that the four geologists considered the possibility of an earthquake to be the greatest hazard associated with the dam. “Young ashflows and associated rhyolitic volcanics like those being used as buttresses for the dam,” they wrote, “are cut by very young block faults.” Often, they said, undetected faults with substantial destructive capability can exist in such terrain. “The Seismic Risk Map of the coterminous United States assigns southeastern Idaho to Zone 3,” the code for highest seismic risk. Although the geologists—Steven Oriel, Hal Prostka, Ed Ruppel, and David Schleicher—stopped just short of urging the Bureau to abandon its plans to build on the Teton site, they asked that their observations “be given the serious consideration we believe they merit.”

Actually, the tone of the memorandum was mild and rather conservative compared with an earlier internal draft prepared by Dave Schleicher, who had made the initial observations. In his draft, which was addressed to his colleagues instead of the Bureau itself and written in early December of 1972, Schleicher, besides mentioning all the risks that were included in the later memorandum, expressed amazement over the fact that the Bureau appeared oblivious to them. “Within the last five years five earthquakes less than 30 miles from the proposed Teton damsite have been detected,” he wrote. “At least two of them had Richter magnitudes greater than 3.