Copyright © 2012, 1996 by Blaine Harden

The lines from “The Talkin’ Blues” reprinted by kind permission of Ludlow Music. WGP/TRO-© Copyright 1988 Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY. Stanzas from “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” reprinted by permission of Ludlow Music. Words by Woody Guthrie. Music based on “Goodnight, Irene” by Huddie Ledbetter and John A. Lomax. WGP/TRO-© Copyright 1936, 1957, 1963 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Excerpt from “She-Who-Watches, the Names Are Prayer” from Seven Hands, Seven Hearts by Elizabeth Woody (Portland, Or: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994); © by Elizabeth Woody; reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

First published as a Norton paperback 1997; reissued 2012

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Book design and cartography by Helene Berinsky

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Harden, Blaine.

A river lost : the life and death of the Columbia / Blaine Harden.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-03936-6

1. Economic development—Environmental aspects—Columbia River Region. 2. Economic development—Social aspects—Columbia River Region. 3. Water resources development—Columbia River Region—History. 4. Environmental degradation—Columbia River Region.

I. Title.

HC107.A195H37 1996

333.91’6215’09797—dc20

95-38618

ISBN 978-0-393-34256-7 pbk.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

*The official Bureau position on why Grand Coulee made no provision for fish passage is that the height of the dam made it impossible, given engineering knowledge in the 1930s. As Downs said, however, the Bureau’s failure to provide for salmon was more a matter of money and interest.

Milo Bell, professor emeritus in bioengineering at the University of Washington and one of the world’s leading authorities on dam design and salmon survival, told me there was no technical reason why a fish ladder could not have been built in the 1930s that would have allowed a very high percentage of salmon to climb around the dam. “The fish don’t care how they swim upstream,” Bell said.

The more vexing bioengineering problem presented by a high dam like Grand Coulee was safe downstream passage of juveniles over the dam’s spillway. But on this, too, the Bureau simply was not interested in conducting tests or spending money to design a dam that would keep salmon alive, according to Bell, a longtime consultant to the federal government in dam design in the Pacific Northwest. Bell said the steep spillway at Grand Coulee forces fish to “fall out of the water on the way down. They strike at 120 feet per second, and they are dead.”

This design, Bell said, was chosen by the Bureau because it dissipated most of the river’s erosive energy at the base of the dam, where the Bureau built a concrete “bucket” to absorb the impact of the falling river. Bell said the Bureau was worried that a more gradual slope for the spillway, which would have allowed juvenile salmon to survive the fall over the dam, might “cause problems to the [dam’s] foundation. Their testing was designed not to dig a hole [under the dam]. They did not test to spill fish. The Bureau did not wish to spend any money on fish.”

*A later series of at least forty catastrophic floods, coming from another direction, out of the northeast, deepened and widened the Grand Coulee.

*For the Bonneville Power Administration, spilling the Columbia is the same as throwing away money. In the twenty-four hours that the Columbia spilled over Grand Coulee Dam that weekend, the BPA lost about $1.17 million in potential electricity sales.

*Regional historian Paul Pitzer, whose multi-volume history of Grand Coulee Dam is the source of several quotations in these pages, points out that the myth of Grand Coulee had grown to such a point in the late 1940s that it was getting credit for victories it had not won. “The fact that Germany had been defeated before the advent of the bomb . . . hardly mattered,” Pitzer writes. “Grand Coulee provided for the bomb, and the bomb ended the war. Hence Grand Coulee won World War II. The logic became irrefutable.”

*Grand Coulee Dam is no longer the largest producer of electricity in the world. Two dams in South America produce more power. The Three Gorges dam in China dwarfs Grand Coulee, producing more than three times as much electricity.

*The Columbia Cup was originally called the Atomic Cup in honor of nearby Hanford’s contribution to the making of atomic weapons. The name was changed in 1976, with the rise of the anti-nuclear movement, and changed again in 2007 to the Lamb-Weston Columbia Cup, in honor of a corporate sponsor that makes French fries and onion rings.

*The geological detective work that discovered and explained the floods was done in the 1920s by J. Harlen Bretz, a geologist from the University of Chicago. But it took the American geological community more than half a century of scoffing and nit-picking before it accepted Bretz’s description of the catastrophic floods. He was awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, the highest honor in his field, in 1979.

*I asked the Department of the Navy for permission to ride on one of the tugs pushing a reactor core up the river for burial. Permission was “respectfully” denied on the obtuse grounds that the reactor shipments “represent less than one tenth of one percent of the commercial cargo that transits the navigational locks of the Columbia River” and “for this reason would not be representative of the much larger interests in the river.”

*Like a number of salmon myths I heard out on the river, McDowell’s story about the poisoning of all the sockeye in central Idaho exploits a nugget of fact to tell a misleading and self-serving untruth. The real story is neither as appealing nor as appalling as McDowell’s version. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game did poison three high-mountain lakes in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It did so with the intent of killing trash fish, thereby allowing the lakes to be stocked with rainbow trout, a game fish that officials hoped would attract tourists to Idaho. At the time of the poisonings, state fish counts showed no sockeye population in any of the three lakes. Later investigation found that the lakes might have been spawning territory for as much as a quarter of Idaho’s sockeye population. The fish and game department, however, never poisoned and never considered poisoning two lakes where fish counters had located healthy populations of sockeye. Dexter Pitman, manager of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead program, said the story of the poisoning is told by river users “to justify not taking any action to protect the fish and to belittle the sanity of fish biologists.”

*Under the law, farmers may receive project water at subsidized prices on up to 960 acres of owned or leased land. If they lease land in excess of 960 acres, they are required to pay full cost. Despite the guilty plea of the Royal City farmer, widespread violations of federal limits on farm size continue in the Columbia Basin, according to a number of farmers and irrigation experts.

*Washington State Senator Frank “Tub” Hansen, a Moses Lake cattle rancher and member of the state legislature for nineteen years, died in 1991 at age seventy-eight.

*Jackson died unexpectedly in office in 1983, after thirty years in the Senate and twelve years in the House. Magnuson was defeated in 1980, after thirty-six years in the Senate and seven years in the House.

†The 1956 law allowed an unmarried farmer to own 160 acres of land in the Project and a married couple to own 320 acres. These limits, however, were a fiction because farmers were allowed to lease as much land as they wanted. In 1981, in a major overhaul of reclamation law, the ownership limit in Bureau projects across the West was raised to 960 acres. In an attempt to prevent wealthy farmers from unfair use of subsidized water, leasing inside Bureau projects was banned. This limit, however, was widely ignored by farmers who enlisted their family and friends to hold legal title to Bureau land that they farm.

*The on-the-ground record of federal reclamation across the West is rather different from its intentions. While encouraging some of the worst water-conservation practices in the world, it has been a tool of agribusiness, has ignored Native Americans and Hispanics, and has failed to protect small farms.

*The Bureau of Reclamation calculated, in a 1988 letter to a House subcommittee, that it had spent $2,164.40 on each acre in the Project. Multiplied by the 350 acres that the Osbornes own, the subsidy for their farm comes to $757,540.

*Forty-five miles downstream from Seward’s place is Chief Joseph Dam, the second largest hydropower plant in the Northwest. Like Grand Coulee, that federal dam does not have fish ladders. All salmon in the Columbia above Chief Joseph disappeared when it was completed in 1961.

*This pattern of treatment has been the same across the irrigated West, with Indian lands being flooded under federal reservoirs as electricity and irrigation water flow away to white people. A National Water Commission, in a comprehensive report to Congress on federal reclamation schemes in the West, said that the federal government consistently ignored Indian water rights guaranteed under federal law. “With few exceptions the projects were planned and built by the Federal Government without any attempt to define, let alone protect, prior rights that Indian tribes might have had. . . . In the history of the United States Government’s treatment of Indian tribes, its failure to protect Indian water rights for use on the Reservations it set aside for them is one of the sorrier chapters.”

*Hanford has not always been politically incorrect. The Department of the Interior produced a movie about the Columbia River in the early 1950s that made glowing reference to Hanford and its role in manufacturing plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The narrator of that film (who did not pretend to speak for the river) said: “In the barren hills below Grand Coulee, the stream grew warmer and almost magically the atomic bomb was born. Thus the power of the Columbia helped bring our boys back from the Pacific two years sooner than they had dared hope.”

*Radioactive or not, dam builders from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were eager to seize and squeeze electricity out of this last wild stretch of the river. As recently as 1979, after Hanford had been in the plutonium business for more than three decades, the Corps organized a tour of the Hanford Reach to show how useful the proposed Ben Franklin Dam could be. “The unimpounded Hanford Reach represents a break in the total Columbia River hydropower system,” tour literature said. “A dam and a reservoir on the Reach could provide an additional energy supply and improve the hydraulic efficiency of the entire Columbia River hydropower system.” Ben Franklin Dam is now considered a dead idea.

†That is the half-life for the longest lived of the radionuclides known to be shifting around in the uncontained aquifer beneath Hanford. The aquifer discharges to the Columbia.

*The U.S. Army ruled out Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as a site for the huge plutonium factory because, as General Leslie R. Groves, head of the U.S. effort to develop an atomic bomb, put it, if a “reactor were to explode and throw great quantities of highly radioactive materials into the atmosphere when the wind was blowing toward Knoxville, the loss of life and the damage to health in the area might be catastrophic.”

*As it turned out, the petition to list mid-Columbia summer chinook salmon as an endangered species was turned down by the federal government. Federal fish agencies concluded in 1994 that the salmon’s numbers were declining, but it was not facing extinction. After a long losing streak, the decision was a major victory for irrigators and other users of the river.

*The sheriff’s department in Hood River County said that the cold of the Columbia is far more dangerous to windsurfers than the barges. The river’s temperature hovers around the mid-50s in the spring and early summer. “They don’t realize how cold that is,” said one deputy. “They fall in and they cannot get up.”

*Sometime after I talked to Nykanen, he ran out of money. He went to work in Los Angeles for tabloid television. He helped direct coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial. Nykanen planned to work in tabloid TV just long enough to subsidize another round of fiction and windsurfing in the gorge.

*“Dalles” comes from the French word for “flagstones.” The name was bestowed by voyageurs who, on their way through the gorge, thought the even slabs of basalt that encased the river resembled flagstones in the courtyards of Montreal.

*Unsoeld was soundly defeated in the 1994 election that swept a Republican majority into Congress.

*Hypothyroidism is caused by an inadequate production of thyroid hormone. Its early symptoms read like a shopping list of the ills of middle-aged America. They include fatigue, forgetfulness, unexplained weight gain, and constipation.

*A rad is a measure of absorbed radiation. It is roughly the equivalent of a dozen chest X-rays. The current federal limit for an annual safe dose of man-made radiation is 0.025 rad. Federal guidelines call for evacuation if the dose to the thyroid reaches 5–25 rads.

*The relative health of the Hanford Reach, as far as fish and wildlife are concerned, is a function of a half century of isolation from farming, suburban sprawl, slackwater, and other development. Wildlife on the site has, on occasion, been measured with dangerously high levels of radiation. But, in general, all species of fish and game have prospered. Radiation in the river, which is diluted by the enormous flow of the Columbia, does not appear to have had any deleterious effect on salmon. The fish, of course, spend the bulk of their lives in the Pacific Ocean, far from N Springs and Hanford’s other riverside delights.

*Plutonium, first identified in 1940 at the University of California in Berkeley, was named after the planet Pluto, which was named for the Greek god of the underworld, the lord of the dead. The synthetic element is the preferred fuel for bombs because it is highly fissionable; that is, easy to explode. Weapons-grade plutonium is made inside an atomic reactor, from natural uranium. After being separated from uranium by chemical means, it is molded into hockey-puck-sized “buttons” for use in bombs. While plutonium itself is one of the most poisonous substances known to man (a microscopic speck in the lungs can cause cancer), a nickel-plated plutonium button can be oddly comforting to touch. “When you hold a lump of it in your hand,” wrote physicist Leona Marshall Libby, “it feels warm, like a live rabbit.” Storing the live rabbit can be treacherous. Too much plutonium kept too close together can create a spontaneous “criticality,” a deadly flash of radiation and heat.

*The appeals court wrote: “The Council’s approach seems largely to have been from the premise that only small steps are possible, in light of entrenched river users’ claims of economic hardship. [Claims that the court found to be unsubstantiated.] Rather than asserting its role as a regional leader, the Council has assumed the role of a consensus builder, sometimes sacrificing the [Power] Act’s fish and wildlife goals for what is, in essence, the lowest common denominator acceptable to power interests and [aluminum companies].”

*The spotted-owl issue is often caricatured as an example of environmental extremism. But the owl was a symptom of irreplaceable habitat destroyed by pollution and development. Before a federal judge halted logging in federal forests in the Northwest, 90 percent of the spotted owl’s old-growth habitat had already been destroyed.

*The Grant County Public Utility District, as it turns out, did not need the advice. For at least ten years before the memo was written, as it continued to use cheap power rates to lure heavy industrial users of electricity to the Columbia Basin, the utility resisted installation of salmon bypass screens at its dams on the Columbia. After a decade of delay, the utility was finally ordered by a federal judge to build and install the screens.

*When the dams began going in the thirties, fishing was not an insignificant matter. The Army Corps of Engineers, in a massive document laying out a scheme for dams on the Columbia, noted in 1932 that salmon fishing was the fourth largest industry in the Northwest, after farming, ranching, and timber. It employed about thirteen thousand fishermen and earned about ten million dollars a year. It is worth noting that in the Corps’ magnum opus on dams, a document running to 1,280 pages, just two and a half pages dealt with fish.

*The Bonneville Power Administration was not the only power agency to fall from grace. The Army Corps of Engineers, long worshipped in Northwest newspapers for its dam-building and job-creating prowess, was accused by Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon of hiding “behind a bureaucratic curtain and pretend[ing] it has no responsibility to change the very operations that are killing these fish.” Hatfield said that “this can-do agency is becoming a don’t-know agency.” When the Corps dedicated its state-of-the-art fish bypass center at McNary Dam, protesters showed up dressed as the Grim Reaper.

*Since WHOOPS. Congress has begun picking at BPA’s budget, its padded payroll, and its cozy relationship with traditional clients, especially aluminum companies and irrigators.

Aluminum companies paid substantially less for electricity than other customers. The rationale for the discount was that they helped the hydrosystem by using power at night when demand is low. Also, their power supply could be cut in times of drought. But aluminum companies got special considerations that weren’t remotely related to the workings of the hydrosystem. The price they paid Bonneville for electricity went up and down with the world price of aluminum. If things were bad for the industry, as they were after the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a glut of cheap aluminum on the world market, then Northwest plants did not have to pay so much for power.

What all this added up to, according to congressional reports, was a sweetheart deal. The cost of babying aluminum companies with special rates was just under $1 billion between 1986 and 1995. But the industry went bust anyhow. Unable to compete with higher technology and lower labor costs in other countries, nearly all of the aluminum smelters in the Northwest stopped operations by 2001.

Bonneville’s discounts for irrigators also raised eyebrows at a time of rising electricity rates for household consumers. If farmers in federal irrigation schemes in the Northwest paid the same rate for power as other BPA customers, the power agency could increase its revenues by about $32 million a year. If farmers on non-federal irrigation schemes paid the going rate, that would raise another $27 million a year. If all irrigators left their water in the river, Bonneville would have between $150 and $300 million more electricity to sell.

At the very least, according to a congressional report called “BPA at a Crossroads,” raising power rates for farmers would provide a powerful incentive for irrigators to conserve water. That would keep more water in the river for salmon and for power generation.

*The inflation-adjusted price fell from 2.74 cents a kilowatt-hour in 1940 to 0.65 cent in 1980.