Grand Coulée Dam, 2005, © EOP
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is perhaps the most famous water project in the United States, but during the Depression years and the New Deal of the 1930s, several huge water projects were initiated or expanded under the control of the Bureau of Reclamation. As today is my birthday, I thought I might indulge myself and write a little about the one I know the best and with which my family has had close connections, the Columbia Basin Project an irrigation and hydroelectric scheme using the huge flow of the Columbia River, an exotic river flowing across the northern and central parts of Washington State. Its centerpiece is Grand Coulée Dam (shown above and again at the end of this posting) for many years the largest hydroelectric facility on earth and still the largest in the United States.
In the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, the Great Columbia Plain (pace Donald Meinig) was a vast steppe or high desert atop one of the more geologically interesting bits of the United States, the Columbia basalt flow. In the early years of settlement, after the Northern Pacific Crossed that steppe at a diagonal with its route from Spokane to Pasco, there was some settlement and dryland agriculture, wheat farming and ranching, but the area was lightly populated. Only water was necessary for an agricultural bonanza, it was claimed. The Columbia Basin Project, long a goal of Chambers of Commerce and other civic booster groups in the central and eastern part of Washington State, was intended to provide that water in a scheme similar, though not identical, to the TVA, with the dual goals of long term regional development and stimulus spending in a depression.
A make-work project to employ some of the large number of unemployed, Grand Coulée Dam was begun in 1933 and completed 9 years later, one of the largest engineering projects ever undertaken up to that time, though in publicity it was somewhat overshadowed by construction of Boulder Dam in a dramatic canyon of the Colorado River ongoing at the same time. When it was being built there was no clear idea of how or where the vast amount of electricity Grand Coulée Dam could produce would be consumed, though sale of electricity was to help fund the project and pay for the more than 1000 km of irrigation canals and drainage ditches the project would require if carried to completion. World War II defense industries, including Boeing's Seattle plants, rendered the issue of where to sell the electricity moot until 1945, after which a series of aluminum smelters purchased much of the electricity produced.
Meanwhile the irrigation scheme was constructed, albeit at a slower pace. Several of the major canals and drainage works were not completed until the 1960s and 1970s. Irrigation has transformed the sere steppe into an immense green expanse, at least in Spring and early summer. Areas where the distance between trees was measured in kilometers in the 1930s or even as late as the 1960s, have become orchards and vinyards. Dryland wheat or barley has been replaced by water intensive field crops including corn (maize). Sounds wonderful, the bonanza promised by early boosters, but the change has come at some environmental costs to be examined in a later posting.
Grand Coulée Dam, 2005, © EOP
