The GRAND PLAN (part 1 of 6)

An essay by Ray Wheeler

Colorado River in Marble Canyon, from Beamer Trail. Photo © 1999 Ray Wheeler

Introduction

"As plans for energy development on the Colorado Plateau progressed, Arizona Public Service and a number of California utilities began to argue that the time was right for a regionwide strategy for energy development....  The major thrust of the discussions...centered around what James Mulloy of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power called 'the Grand Plan.'  The Grand Plan involved the construction of massive coal and nuclear power plants to provide an ample and inexpensive new energy source for the West's booming metropolises via economies of scale.  The idea, according to Mulloy, was that coal-fired plants would be built inland, while the California utilities would build nuclear plants on the coast....  Transmission lines, which would bring electricity from the coal-fired plants on the Colorado Plateau, could simply be reversed to carry some of the nuclear-generated power back to the interior West." —Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb. 1982. Empires in the Sun, Putnam, New York, NY, page 42.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, a ring of major urban-industrial centers including Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Reno, and Boise had formed around the perimeter of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin. As these urban centers grew in size and tightened their commercial and transportation links, the formidable wilderness at the center of the ring—the terra incognita that had time and again repelled or deflected the march of civilization—began instead to evoke a kind of fatal attraction.

The transformation of the Colorado Plateau from terra incognita to Ultimate Resource began on May 14, 1901 with the completion of a canal that would bring Colorado river water to the vast agricultural lands of California’s Imperial Valley, a natural basin well below sea level, through which the Colorado had intermittently flowed as it wandered erratically across its delta towards the Gulf of California. That first Imperial Valley canal was destroyed in 1905 by rampaging spring floodwater. But the project had given birth to a dream that would fire the imaginations of western entrepreneurs for the remainder of the century.

The Dream was to capture and redirect the flow of the Colorado River to supply water to ranches, farms and cities, some of them as much as three hundred miles from the river, throughout seven western states. Among the first beneficiaries of The Dream would be Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the land barons of California’s Imperial Valley. Without external sources of water none of these localities could have sustained significant growth. With it they would grow and prosper.

Fulfillment of The Dream would take nearly a century and billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies. But fulfilled it would be—and substantially overfulfilled. Today, many hundreds of miles of the Colorado river and its tributaries lie impounded behind hundreds of dams. Between existing and planned diversion projects the Colorado’s estimated average flow of 15 million acre-feet has been substantially over-committed, on paper and in fact. In a drought year, at its mouth, the great river all but ceases to flow.

Follow these links to:
Hoover Dam and the Exportation of Wealth
The Environmental Costs
A Scale to Fit the Landscape
Boom and Bust
Fragmented land—Fractured Politics
References