Cadillac Desert (33 page)

In 1937, the Bureau of Reclamation was just beginning its detailed feasibility investigations of the Kings and Kern River projects; it had, in fact, already been authorized to build the Kings River Project on the basis of cruder reconnaissance studies alone. In the very same year that the Bureau began its investigations, however, the Corps went to the House Flood Control and Appropriations Committees and extracted an authorization and some money to perform investigations of its own on these same two rivers—rivers which, in effect, had already been promised to the Bureau. It was a brazen act. The Bureau was incensed, and Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, was apoplectic. Nonetheless, neither the Bureau nor Ickes could do anything to stop the Corps; they were, in effect, in a race. The National Resources Planning Board, one of FDR’s superagencies, pleaded with the agencies to plan a unified project, then practically ordered them to do so. But they refused. As a result, in 1940, Congress received two separate reports on developing the Kings and the Kern: one on a traditional Reclamation project, the other on a project that purported to be for flood control, but which, by controlling the rivers’ runoff and drying up Tulare Lake, would irrigate a roughly equal amount of land.

It was a bureaucratic battle that was to drag on for more than five years. Sympathies in California, where the Bureau had a lot of support from smaller farmers, were divided—as they were in Congress. The Roosevelt administration, however, was emphatically on the side of the Bureau of Reclamation. FDR felt so strongly about the matter that on the 5th of May, 1941, he wrote a personal letter to the chairman of the House Flood Control Committee, saying, “A good rule for Congress to apply in considering these water projects, in my opinion, would be that the dominant interest should determine which agency should build and operate the project.” Obviously, Roosevelt said, the dominant interest was irrigation. “Not only that, but Kings River had already been authorized for construction by the Bureau of Reclamation; to [reauthorize] would only lead to needless confusion.”

But the Flood Control Committee was practically married to the Corps of Engineers, and ignored Roosevelt’s recommendation; the committee quickly authorized Kings River for construction by the Corps. With Ickes lobbying furiously on behalf of the Bureau, however, the full Congress refused to go along.

At that point, FDR made what would, in retrospect, look like a fateful mistake. The United States had by then entered the Second World War; to squander precious funds on a water project when there was still no demonstrable need for it seemed foolish. Even a few hundred thousand dollars would have given the Bureau enough of a head start, at least on the already-authorized Kings River project, to thwart the Corps’ ambition. But Roosevelt refused to recommend any money in his budget.

To the Corps of Engineers, the Bureau’s inability to move represented a last chance. In 1942, without any clear authorization from Congress, it began to construct an “emergency” flood diversion structure on the lower Kings. Although its action outraged those members who sided with the Bureau, and who saw what the Corps was trying to do, they could not bring the full Congress, now utterly preoccupied with the war, to waste its time debating such a trivial issue. Besides, the Corps’ works didn’t seem like much, a mere diversion gate. But it wasn’t the size of the works so much as the fact that the Corps had established its beachhead in the Tulare Basin before the Bureau ever got to turn a shovelful of earth. The Corps also made sure the floodwaters were diverted where they could do some economic good—toward the lands of the big growers.

Nothing much happened with the Kings River and Kern River projects during the middle war years. By 1944, however, Europe’s farmlands and economy were in ruins; overnight, the United States had become the breadbasket of the world. Now, at last, the two projects seemed to make some sense. In his budget request for fiscal year 1945, FDR included a request of $1 million to permit the Bureau to begin work on the Kings River. The House, dominated by the Flood Control Committee, immediately took the appropriation out; the Senate threw it back in. Finally, hearings had to be scheduled to try to resolve the matter.

It was at those hearings that the Corps of Engineers demonstrated where its true loyalty lay. Although the White House had left absolutely no doubt that it was strongly behind a Reclamation project, and expected the rest of the administration to support its position, the Corps of Engineers chose not to; instead, Chief of Engineers Raymond A. Wheeler displayed outright defiance of his commander in chief. Testifying at the hearings, Wheeler gave no support at all to the Roosevelt position, a breach of loyalty that made Harold Ickes, the ultimate Roosevelt loyalist, absolutely livid. Meanwhile, the deputy chief was busy undermining the administration’s position back in California. In a speech to a group of business leaders in Sacramento, Major General Thomas Robins said that Californians were being denied “necessary flood control” by “a lot of arguments that are neither here nor there.” If the state would only “wake up and get the water first and then decide what to do with it,” he said, “she would be a lot better off.” Otherwise, by the time the dams are built “we may all be dead.” What Robins didn’t say is that most Californians
wouldn’t be able
to use the water in the Kings and the Kern if the Corps built the dams. It had already announced that it would build dams, but not aqueducts; therefore, the water couldn’t go anywhere but down the river channels, and the big growers owned nearly all the land on both sides. The Corps had also announced that if its projects offered incidental irrigation benefits, it would not apply the Reclamation Act and its acreage laws. What all of this meant was that if the Corps built the Kings and Kern dams, nearly all of the water could be used by four agribusiness giants and a handful of oil companies owning land nearby—which were to become agribusiness giants themselves.

In the end, the hearings resolved nothing. Congress was still deadlocked. Sensing this, it came up with an inimitable solution to a paralysis of its own making: it authorized the Kings River Project for construction by
both
the Bureau and the Corps. Whichever could convince the appropriations committees to give it money first would end up building it.

The fight now began to get serious. In its budget request for fiscal year 1947, the Truman administration said that the War Department’s earlier requests to begin construction on both the Kings and Kern river were to be considered “officially eliminated.” There were to be no further requests from the Corps of Engineers pending “a decision by the President as to the course to be followed on these works.” In his personal testimony during the appropriations hearings, however, the Chief of Engineers calmly announced that “we are ready to make a definite recommendation to undertake the construction”—a remark that could only be interpreted as smug defiance once again of his commander in chief.

Had Roosevelt not died, the Corps might well have lost the battle. But Harry Truman lacked the romantic feeling about the Reclamation program that Roosevelt had, and he was from a state where the Corps was generally loved. Ickes, the old curmudgeon, was gone, too, replaced by the more conciliatory Cap Krug. In the end, the Corps simply played a waiting game, confident that the growers’ friends in Congress would extract money with which it could begin work on both the Kings and the Kern—which they soon did. Truman was so angry that he impounded the first funds, but he gradually lost interest in the whole affair. By 1948, he and Krug had given up. The Kings and Kern rivers belonged to the Corps.

The Army Engineers did accede to Truman’s request that they collect a one-time user fee from the growers. The figure settled on was $14,250,000, which covered just a third of the $42,072,000 cost of Pine Flat Dam. Considering the tens of thousands of new acres that would be opened to double-crop production when the floodwaters were stored in the Pine Flat and Isabella reservoirs, the “user fee” was more tokenism than anything else.

The covert liaison between the Corps of Engineers and the world’s largest irrigation farmers was to live on. A few years later, the Corps added insult to injury by damming the Kaweah and the Tule rivers, which, by rights, should have been Reclamation rivers, too. But as an example of government subsidizing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, nothing would quite equal its performance thirty-five years later in the Tulare Lake floods of 1983.

During the El Niño winter of 1983, when the eastern Pacific’s resident bulge of high pressure migrated to Australia and the storm door was left open for months, much of California got double or triple its normal precipitation. The previous year hadn’t been much different. By the early spring of 1983, all four Corps of Engineers dams were dumping hundreds of thousands of acre-feet over their spillways as the largest snowpack in the annals of official California weather records melted. Because the farmlands in what used to be Tulare Lake were now protected by dikes, most of the water couldn’t enter its old basin and had to go elsewhere. When the floodwaters began encroaching on nearby towns, the Corps of Engineers spent $2.7 million in emergency funds to erect levees around them. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, except that 80,000 acres of old lake bottom—land that could have absorbed the floods—remained dry; one need only have breached one of the levees that had since been built around the ex-lake. But the Tulare Lake Irrigation District, dominated by Salyer and Boswell, wouldn’t have that, so the growers convinced the Corps to spend taxpayers’ money on levees in order that their land, the natural catch basin for the floods, could remain in subsidized production.

However, El Niño was soon to prove too much even for the big growers and the Army Engineers. By March of 1983, the flooding rivers were out of control and one of the lake levees was breached, inundating thirty thousand acres of farmland. The Tulare Lake Irrigation District immediately applied to the Corps for a permit to pump out the water and send it over the Tulare Basin divide into the San Joaquin River, which feeds San Francisco Bay. There was nothing inherently wrong with that idea, either—the bay and the Delta normally can use all the fresh water they can get—except that at least one of the reservoirs upstream had been illegally planted with a species of fish called white bass, which got flushed down by the floodwaters and were already flourishing in the reincarnated Tulare Lake. White bass are a voracious, opportunistic, highly adaptable type of rough fish and love to eat young salmon and striped bass. (Salmon and white bass have never managed to coexist, anywhere.) Unless a fish screen below the pumps could guarantee that 100 percent of the white bass would be removed before entering the San Joaquin, the bay and Delta’s two most valuable commercial and sports fish would be threatened with extinction. Just a handful of escaped white bass of opposite sexes could be enough to seal their doom.

Even though no fish screen has ever operated 100 percent effectively, the Corps of Engineers, ignoring a cacophony of protest from sportsmen in several states, issued another “emergency” permit on Friday, October 7, 1983, to allow the pumping to begin. The growers hadn’t even waited for the permit; the pumps were all in place and ready to operate, and television reporters who arrived to take a look at things were scared away by armed guards. The pumps howled to life minutes after the permit was issued. The California Department of Fish and Game had strung a gill net across the river below the fish screen, just in case. On Saturday morning, not twenty-four hours after the pumping began, the net yielded four white bass. The pumps were shut off, and Fish and Game—as if to underscore the catastrophic consequences of releasing white bass—poured a thousand gallons of rotenone, a virulent pesticide, into six miles of river around the fish screens. Everything in that stretch of river—crappies, black bass, white bass, catfish, crayfish, ducks—died a ghastly death. A week later, Fish and Game performed a second mass poisoning. Then, satisfied that there was no danger to humans, it allowed the pumps to start up again. Every legal effort to stop them failed. Virtually all of the water was pumped out of the lake, and although there is no evidence yet that white bass got into the San Joaquin River and migrated down to the Delta and bay, they could just as well be there; no one knows. If they are—and some sportsmen think it is inevitable that white bass will reach the Delta—then the last remnant of central California’s once prolific salmon fishery may soon be a thing of the past.

It would have been one thing, this whole game of Russian roulette with the most important anadromous fishery in the state, if the drowned lands in Tulare Lake were pumped out so they could grow valuable food. Most of them, however, have been planted in cotton for years. And as the lake was being pumped out, they were not even growing cotton. In March of 1983, just four days after the levee was breached and the floodwaters began to fill Tulare Lake, several of the big corporate farmers applied to the Department of Agriculture for enlistment in the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) program, which had recently been created to relieve the nation’s chronic problem of surplus crop production. Thanks to PIK, they would receive free grain from bulging silos in exchange for not planting crops. The Boswell Company alone got $3.7 million worth of wheat in exchange for keeping fourteen thousand acres idle. (Boswell has consistently received more money from agricultural price support programs than any other farmer in the entire nation.) No one knows how much the other farmers got, but most of the eighty thousand acres of the old lake bed were registered in PIK—even as they were underwater.

In his personal epitaph on the Kings and Kern saga, written in 1951, Harold Ickes lambasted the Corps as “spoilsmen in spirit ... working hand in glove with land monopolies.” He called it a “willful and expensive... self-serving clique... in contempt of the public welfare” which had the distinction of having “wantonly wasted money on worthless projects” to a degree “surpassing any federal agency in the history of this country.... [N]o more lawless or irresponsible group than the Corps of Army Engineers,” Ickes concluded, “has ever attempted to operate in the United States either outside of or within the law.... It is truly beyond imagination.”