Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  When finished, the Grand Coulee Dam was indeed the mightiest thing ever built: four-fifths of a mile wide, 550 feet tall, three times the mass of the Hoover Dam, generating half as much hydroelectricity as the entire country at the time, and capable of irrigating over a million acres. The giant concrete plug in the great canyon backed up the artificial Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake some 150 miles to the Canadian border. Downriver, the Bonneville was already generating electricity and taming the wild five-mile rapids with big locks that enabled the passage upriver of large barges transporting farm produce and bauxite to the aluminum smelting industry that developed around the region’s rapidly expanding availability of electrical power. By the late 1980s, the Columbia River was providing 40 percent of America’s total hydroelectricity.

  Like Hoover and the other multipurpose giants of the era, Coulee’s hydroelectric sales heavily subsidized the building of the dam and associated irrigation project costs. Yet in the late 1930s, carping critics of Roosevelt were still wondering loudly who would buy so much excess electricity. History, however, repeatedly demonstrated that the development of a useful resource inevitably found unimagined and unforeseen productive applications. Yet no one could have anticipated just how swiftly the great need for the northwest’s surplus electricity would arrive. Only five days before the completion of the dam, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The United States entered World War II. The war’s extraordinary mobilization and economic stimulus caused airplane factories and aluminum smelters to spring up throughout the region. By 1942, 92 percent of Grand Coulee’s and Bonneville’s electricity output was powering war production. Most of it went to producing thousands of warplanes bound for the aircraft carriers that turned the war in the Pacific in America’s favor. An aerospace industry vital to the war effort also arose in Southern California on the electricity available from the Hoover Dam. Japan and Germany had nothing to match it.

  It was no exaggeration to say that America’s superior industrial productive capacity in general—and its vastly superior and timely availability of hydroelectric power in particular—played a decisive role in the nation’s rapid rebound from Pearl Harbor and its ultimate victory in the war. Indeed, rarely in history had exploitation of a water resource so dramatically and immediately affected the military outcome and the rise of a great power. During the war, Coulee’s electricity also powered the top-secret Hanford military installation on the Columbia in Washington State to help produce the plutonium-239 that made the United States the preeminent nuclear superpower of the postwar era.

  Less than three months after his dedication of the Hoover Dam, Roosevelt signed off on another immense water-moving and irrigation project for the West’s third great river basin that ran through California’s 450-mile-long, 50-mile-wide Central Valley. Its scale dwarfed the volume of water that Hoover Dam was delivering to the Imperial Valley in Southern California. Set in the basin of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers between the Sierra Nevada and Coastal mountain ranges, the Central Valley Project transferred water from California’s wetter north to its arid south. In the process it transformed a region as dry as North Africa into America’s produce capital and the richest concentration of irrigated farmland in the world. A small boom of private irrigation in the Valley had occurred around World War I when large farmers began to use motorized, centrifugal pumps powered by oil or electricity to tap deeply into the region’s store of groundwater. Through the 1920s, some 23,500 well pipes pumped up prodigious amounts to be able to luxuriously irrigate the San Joaquin Valley in the southern Central Valley, and helped California surpass Iowa as the nation’s leading agricultural state. But by the early 1930s the uncontrolled groundwater pumping had caused the water levels in its large aquifer to plunge so drastically that thousands of acres had to be retired for want of irrigation water. As the aquifer emptied and drought conditions prevailed on the surface, the big farmers of the Central Valley turned reluctantly to the government for relief.

  Inspired by the ambitious water transfers of the Hoover Dam project, they proposed a water transfer plan that would shift resources from watersheds in the north, which were filled by the rainfall and spring snowmelt, to the south through a series of large canals covering hundreds of miles and supplied by two new giant dams. At the heart of the scheme were the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River and the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin. In essence, the Central Valley Project was a bailout for existing, mainly large farm businesses. What it was not was a reclamation plan intended to create many new small farms as foreseen by the original 1902 legislation. But in the midst of the Depression, Roosevelt approved it anyway. In 1934 the Dust Bowl had hit the midwestern plains, destroying farmland and starting the internal mass migration to California. “The Central Valley Project was without question the most magnificent gift any group of American farmers had ever received; they couldn’t have dreamed of building it themselves, and the cheap power and interest exemption constituted a subsidy that would be worth billions over the years,” wrote Mark Reisner in his classic work on western water history, Cadillac Desert. “It rescued thousands of farms that were already there, including many that were far larger than the law allowed.”

  The federal waterworks were followed in the early 1960s by another gigantic, entirely state-built California Water Project that moved water even more ambitiously through a network of dams, reservoirs, and hundreds of miles of aqueducts—featuring a section that pumped water, with an extravagant expenditure of energy, over an entire mountain range in five stages, including a final, Herculean two-fifths of a mile lift. By the time the water started flowing over the mountains in 1971, California was by far the most intensively water-engineered place on the planet. Every big river flowing from the Sierra Nevada was dammed.

  New Deal western waterworks also had their counterparts in the nation’s eastern half. Most celebrated was the Tennessee Valley Authority. Launched in 1933, the TVA attempted nothing less than the comprehensive management of the entire Tennessee River basin, three quarters the area of England, with the declared purpose of raising the economic and social well-being of its downtrodden inhabitants. The TVA’s sweeping powers were governed by an independent public body whose precedent was the special authority granted to the Panama Canal Commission. Throughout the 1920s progressives in Congress had stymied presidential plans to privatize the government’s big dam at Muscle Shoals, its nitrate factory for munitions, and other assets on the Tennessee River through sale or lease to big businessmen such as Henry Ford. Through the TVA, those assets were converted by the New Deal into the centerpiece of an ambitious, state-managed effort to produce electricity, flood control, irrigation water, improved navigation, and even nitrate and phosphate fertilizers for the region’s farmers. No other river in the world had so concentrated an amount of its volume dammed in a staircase of 42 dams and reservoirs, although the 700 miles in the middle reaches of the Missouri River was a close runner-up. The results transformed the Tennessee Valley: rampant spring flooding ceased to afflict Tennessee farmland; improved navigation facilitated freight transport on the river to multiply sixty-seven-fold to 2.2 billion ton-miles in the thirty years leading up to 1963; electricity prices fell by more than half; farm yields multiplied on government-produced fertilizer; endemic malaria was eliminated; even the health of the river valley ecosystem was enhanced by the public reforestation of over a million acres. Tennessee River electricity also powered aluminum and war production factories for World War II, including the Oak Ridge atomic fission center, and brought farmers the first, wondrous benefits of electricity. In the early 1930s, American farmers had been left behind on the dark, Have-Not side of America’s electricity divide. Only 10 percent of farms were electrified. By 1950, thanks chiefly to hydropower, 90 percent of U.S. farmers had access to illumination, refrigeration, radio, and the other productive, modern benefits of electricity.

  Hundreds of huge dams were erected across the country during the apogee of America’s giant dam-building ag
e in the early postwar era. Through all U.S. history some 75,000 dams had been built—about one per day from the end of George Washington’s presidency to the inauguration of George W. Bush over 200 years later. Most of the 6,600 large ones over 50 feet, and all the multipurpose giants, were built after Hoover. For its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Bureau of Reclamation cataloged its cumulative bureaucratic accomplishments: 345 dams, 322 storage reservoirs, 49 power plants marketing over 50 billion kilowatt-hours, 174 water-pumping plants, 15,000 miles of canals, 930 miles of pipelines, 218 miles of tunnels, more than 15,000 miles of drains, irrigation water for 9.1 million acres, and freshwater for 16 million urban and industrial users. Farming in the arid Far West had not merely been born, but flourished as one of world history’s all-time irrigated agricultural gardens. By 1978 the 17 western states had 45.4 million acres under irrigation—10 percent of the world’s total.

  From the 1940s America was by far the most advanced hydraulic engineering civilization on Earth. As in past eras of history, this leadership was reflected in both robust population growth and an even greater surge of available freshwater supply. American water use for all purposes multiplied tenfold, from 40 billion gallons per day to 393 billion gallons between 1900 and 1975. Population tripled in the same period. The more than tripling of freshwater use per person was a leading indicator and driving factor behind the country’s rapid rise in living standards, national economic productivity, and preeminent global influence. America’s intensive proficiency in every traditional category of man’s use of water, and its pioneering leadership in leveraging innovative water breakthroughs was a major reason why it was the best fed, healthiest, first fully electrified, most industrially productive, most urbanized, most transportation efficient, and most militarily powerful nation on Earth in the postwar decades.

  Not all the upsurge in America’s freshwater supply in the Far West derived from its innovative dams. From the mid–1940s, the drought-prone western High Plains was transformed from a hellish Dust Bowl into an irrigated cornucopia of grains by a sudden abundance of water drawn from an altogether different source—an immense, heretofore mostly inaccessible, aquifer that lay buried, like a sealed subbasement, deep beneath the near surface groundwater table underlying its semiarid landscape. Ogallala, or High Plains, water accounted for about one-fifth of total U.S. irrigated farming by the late 1970s, and in good years, up to three-quarters of the entire world’s wheat crop that was sold on international markets. In addition, 40 percent of American cattle drank Ogallala water and ate Ogallala-watered grain—every ton of which required some 1,000 tons of water to grow.

  The hydraulic secret of the arid High Plains was that running far underneath Nebraska, western Kansas, Oklahoma’s Panhandle, northwestern Texas, and small portions of South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico was a giant honeycomb of up to half a dozen enclosed pockets of freshwater that together were the size of Lake Huron, and contained some 3.3 billion acre-feet, or over 235 years’ flow of the Colorado River. The water was wedged between rocks and mixed with silt, sand, and stones. The deepest portion of the aquifer was in the north, so that overall about two-thirds of the water lay under Nebraska and 10 percent each in Texas and Kansas. Ogallala’s “fossil water” was the drop-by-drop accumulation from prehistoric ice ages—one of the largest known subterranean reservoirs that existed deep inside the planet’s bowels at varying depths. Around the planet there was up to 100 times more freshwater locked away in aquifers than flowed freely and readily accessibly on the surface. Such fossil aquifers existed like nonrenewable, stand-alone reservoirs insulated from the planet’s continuous, natural hydrological recycling of surface and shallow groundwater through evaporation and precipitation. They recharged so slowly—Ogallala only half an inch per year from the trickle down from the surface—that they effectively could be used only once before depleting like an empty gas tank.

  Due to water’s great weight and the technological and cost limitations of pumping up water from aquifers, the High Plains’s underground water wealth remained virtually untapped through the 1930s. Waterwheel-powered pumps were useless in an arid land without running streams to drive them, while the cost of transporting coal for steam pumps was prohibitive. Windmills could lift only a few gallons per minute and thus barely skimmed the surface of the Ogallala’s deep reserves. The ranchers’ prairie-grass-grazing cattle herds of the 1870s and 1880s had disappeared in the droughts and heat of the 1890s; with the return of the rains and demand for grain after World War I, farmers again ventured forth with their plow mules into the water-fragile frontiers beyond the 100th meridian. Then during the prolonged drought years of the 1930s came the man-assisted environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl. By clearing their land through cattle grazing and burning harvested wheat stubble, farmers inadvertently turned a fragile ecosystem into an unstable one. Without vegetation to hold the loose topsoil in place, the return of drought, heat, and high, gusting winds kicked up horrific dust storms that devastated farming across the western plains.

  Dust storms were created when dry soil was lifted into the air by hot, high, winds; the resulting cloud of swirling, fine particulates grew larger and larger and gathered force as it swept across the open prairies. Eventually it became a gigantic cloud of stinging, shearing dust up to 10,000 feet high and reaching velocities of 60 to 100 miles per hour. The devastation wreaked by the dust storms was of biblical proportions: crops torn up and entire harvests lost, houses shorn of their paint and chickens of their feathers, dirt clogging mechanical farm equipment and water pipes, and millions of tons of fertile topsoil—the precious patrimony of the land—blown far away forever. In the duster that started on May 9, 1934, some 350 million tons disappeared, darkening the skies and dropping dirt residue over Chicago, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., Savannah, and even ships sailing 300 miles into the Atlantic. Between 1935 and 1938 there were an average of more than 60 major, sky-blackening dust storms each year. In the heart of the Dust Bowl—a 400-mile-long by 300-mile-wide area encompassing parts of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and eastern Colorado—the average acre was stripped of 408 tons of fertile topsoil, leaving behind pauperized, sandy earth. Some 3.5 million “Dust Bowl refugees” abandoned the Midwest in search of work by 1940. Many migrated west to pick crops in California, enduring the hardships chronicled in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath.

  Even as the dust storms blew, the High Plains farmers’ deliverance was at hand in the form of the centrifugal pump already being used with miraculously transformative effects in California’s Central Valley to extract voluminous amounts from its own aquifer. With the postwar recovery and the availability of cheap diesel fuel from the nearby oil patch in Texas and Oklahoma, diesel-powered centrifugal pumps and water wells proliferated. A centrifugal pump could lift 800 gallons of water in only a minute, making widespread irrigation possible on the High Plains for the first time. Oil drilling techniques were also adapted that could raise water even faster. With the postwar invention of the center-pivot irrigation system—a long-tentacled, mobile sprinkler system hooked up to a water well—water pumping and irrigated farming boomed. With some 150,000 pumps extracting huge volumes day and night during the growing seasons, Ogallala annual water use quadrupled between 1950 and 1980, and irrigated acreage septupled to 14 million acres. By the late 1970s, intensified by modern petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and generous farm subsidies, the 1 percent of American farmers working 6 percent of the nation’s cropland that forty years earlier had been a desolate Dust Bowl, were growing 15 percent of that nation’s wheat, corn, cotton, and sorghum.

  But the boom couldn’t last indefinitely. Farmers were drawing water out of the Ogallala 10 times faster than the aquifer network was recharging. Irrigation farmers were living on borrowed time and water. The most profligate drilling was in west Texas and other southern portions of the aquifer. One Kansas region that in 1970 thought it had reserves for 300 years discovered in 1980 that it had on
ly a seventy-year supply left. Water that had accumulated over so many millennia, and acted like an emergency reserve of nature, would be consumed in a one-time irrigation bonanza lasting no more than a century unless it was conserved or used more productively. The prairie would revert to its natural, hardscrabble aridity, its agricultural bounty wither in a new cloud of dust.

  Drawing America’s groundwater patrimony for unsustainable food exports to foreign countries was a particularly shortsighted policy. From the late 1970s, drawdown allocation agreements and sharply increased pumping costs due to the era’s oil price shocks, slowed the rate of depletion and encouraged irrigation efficiencies that got “more crop per drop.” Yet the overdrafts—which by 2000 totaled 200 million acre-feet, or 14 Colorado Rivers—were highly concentrated in a few shallower, southern regions. Thus while sustainable equilibrium was being achieved in water-rich Nebraska, Texas and Kansas had already used up some 30 percent and one-sixth of their total shares, respectively, and were still overdrawing at a reckless pace. The looming storm cloud gathering over parts of the prairie was the question how long accessible water from the Ogallala reservoir would last. The day of reckoning for Texas and Kansas was expected to hit between 2020 and 2030.