One dam after another

Former U.S. Rep. Sid Morrison says that building the Black Rock Dam east of Yakima would create "an oasis in the desert," but the federal Bureau of Reclamation says it would create 16 cents worth of benefit for every dollar invested, so the project looks like a goner. Not that it ever looked very promising. And not that ideas for big water projects ever really die.

The dam would create a new reservoir near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It would store water pumped from the Columbia River during high flows and release the water as needed into the canals of the Roza Irrigation District. The flows from Black Rock would replace water that would otherwise be drawn from the Yakima River. Morrison, who heads the Yakima Basin Storage Alliance, has pushed the idea for years.

Last week, the Bureau of Reclamation released figures showing Black Rock Dam would cost $6.7 billion to build and operate and generate benefits of $1 billion. This isn't the first time anyone has cast a cold eye on the costs and benefits, but the numbers "just keep getting worse," says Michael Garrity of American Rivers. Lawyer and activist Rachael Paschal-Osborne of the Center for Environmental Law and Policy adds that the project seems "even less cost-effective than the last time they looked at it."

And people seem to have noticed. The day after the bureau's report came out, Paschal-Osborne said, "I picked up the paper today and for the first time saw a federal official say, 'This dam is not going to be built.'"

Black Rock probably isn't the kind of investment you'd make - at least not the kind of investment you'd try to make – with your own money. And, in fact, if the project requires local money, it's dead. It's the kind of thing only the feds would build, and with that kind of cost-benefit analysis, Congress isn't likely to take out its checkbook for Black Rock. (If the dam site were in southeast Alaska, say, or rural West Virginia, Congress might be more inclined to overlook costs and benefits.)

Most people who live outside the arid regions probably think big dams are an idea whose time has already long-since passed. After all, we're tearing down dams on the Elwha River, probably tearing them down on the White Salmon, possibly tearing them down on the Klamath. At least some people contemplate tearing them down on the lower Snake River. Does anyone really contemplate building new ones?

You bet. People contemplate building new ones right here in the Pacific Northwest. Black Rock isn't the only big dam project on Washington's radar screen - or, perhaps one should say, on some Washingtonians' wish lists. Four others - Hawk Creek, Crab Creek, Sand Hollow, and Foster Creek – are at least being studied. One would back water up seven miles into Canada. Another would be taller than Hoover Dam.

"The scale of these structures would be massive," James Hagengruber wrote two years ago in the Spokane Spokesman-Review. "The dam at Foster Creek, for example, would be 11,000 feet long and 700 feet high, according to a 2005 Department of Ecology report. This size is roughly twice as big as the Grand Coulee Dam, which is the largest concrete structure in North America." Nevertheless, "state officials say Washington's water needs are as massive as these dams. Wells are going dry in portions of central and Eastern Washington. The Odessa Aquifer, for instance, could use about 360,000 acre feet of water to replenish depleted groundwater."

It sure could. For the past half century, farmers east of Ephrata, Wash., have been pumping from an aquifer of fossil water, some of which has been carbon dated at 30,000 years - in other words, before the last glaciers melted and before the glacial floods swept through Eastern Washington. Originally, they used the water to irrigate what had previously been dryland wheat farms, tripling their yields. When prices spiked to record levels after the Russian wheat deal of 1973, the pumping accelerated.

Everybody knew from the start that the water couldn't last. Like the members of some dryland cargo cult, they faced east, toward Washington, D.C., hoping that deliverance would come when the federal government built phase two of the Columbia Basin Project, the mammoth New Deal scheme that has irrigated 671,000 acres of central Washington with water stored behind Grand Coulee and pumped uphill - for free - by electricity generated at the great dam. Phase two would irrigate nearly another half million acres. (The original federal legislation authorized a total of 1,029,999 acres.)

In the mid-1970s, Sen. Warren Magnuson, D-Wash., broke loose stalled congressional funding for a Second Bacon Siphon and Tunnel, which would be the key to phase two; then he and Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., overcame President Jimmy Carter's opposition to actually get it built. The Second Bacon Siphon and Tunnel was completed in 1979. Phase Two seemed all ready to go.