Outdoor Idaho
Bureau of Reclamation

Bruce Reichert, Host:
No federal agency has done more to change the face of the West.

Using concrete, Yankee ingenuity, and lots of taxpayer dollars, the Bureau of Reclamation transformed the entire economic base of the region.

But then things started to fall apart.

Cecil Andrus, Former Governor & Interior Secretary:
They didn’t care about the environment, they didn’t care about the fishery, they didn’t care about anything other than building those structures. But things and times change, and they did not change with it.

Reichert:
Today, the Bureau has a new mission, not to build dams, but to manage the water behind them.

John Keys, Former Regional Director, Bureau of Reclamation:
How are we going to come up with the right balance of how to use that water? That’s the challenge for the 21st century.

Reichert:
But can this federal agency change its stripes and still be accepted?

Perry Swisher, Former Idaho Public Utilities Commissioner:
I would suggest that they sunset.

Randy Bingham, Manager, Burley Irrigation District:
I don’t believe we need another Environmental Protection Agency.

Reichert:
The West’s growing pains are mirrored in the life and times of the Bureau of Reclamation.

Reichert:
It wasn’t the first dam in Idaho, but it was certainly the largest when it was built back in 1915. In fact, Arrowrock Dam, on the Boise River was for a time, the highest dam in the world.

Hi, I’m Bruce Reichert and welcome to Outdoor Idaho. You know, those were fascinating times back then, an entire nation mobilized to push back the desert, and the Bureau of Reclamation was the instrument to do it.

They were the pyramids of the American desert, the engineering marvels of the modern world, the product of the Bureau of Reclamation.

While some wondered about the wisdom of spending millions to grow crops in a desert, to others it was the nation’s manifest destiny.

We had pushed aside foreign countries and native peoples. Now we would push aside the desert.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Westerners found a friend in President Teddy Roosevelt.

He understood the incredible pull of the West, understood that its future depended upon irrigated water.

He had watched as many private attempts to conquer the desert had failed.

And, like most people of his generation, Roosevelt viewed free flowing rivers as wasted water.

In 1902, Congress gave Roosevelt what he wanted, a federal reclamation program.

But it was another Roosevelt who truly understood the mythic symbolism of these water projects.

The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work, and Franklin Roosevelt, desperate for a gesture of optimism, turned to the Bureau of Reclamation.

Audio Tape of Roosevelt:
This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind. And the transformation wrought here in these years is a 20th century marvel.

This is an engineering victory of the first order, another great achievement of American resourcefulness, American skill, and American determination.

Reichert:
The 1930’s were the glory years of the Bureau of Reclamation, with dams like the Hoover on the Colorado, Shasta on the Sacramento, the Grand Coulee on the Columbia.
 
These dams symbolized an America back on track. They also represented the beginning of a formidable political juggernaut that would last for decades.

The Bureau, together with western Congressmen and irrigation interests, formed what political scientists came to call an iron triangle. They knew how to bring home the bacon.

Swisher:
You were not elected to office in Idaho’s 2nd Congressional District nor to the Senate, if you didn’t understand the power of the Bureau; it was awesome.

Reichert:
Perry Swisher, a former Public Utilities commissioner, still marvels at the work of the “spin doctors” at the Bureau of Reclamation.

Swisher:
Reclaim from what, you know? It’s as if today if that word were still available, you’d use it to describe what you did with the city landfill in order to make it into a city golf course; you’d be reclaiming that land; but what was being reclaimed in the era of the Bureau, I don’t know. That was way ahead of the spin artists and ahead of Madison Avenue.

Reichert:
One of the Bureau’s first success stories was here in Idaho, at Minidoka, where irrigation water transformed a land of sagebrush and jackrabbits into thriving communities.

Swisher:
The politicians who did that were proud of themselves, and felt that they had done, and they had done, great things to create an economic opportunity for people who would have been serfs in the old world.

Today we think of poverty in terms of the ghetto, the inner city. Poverty in my father’s day meant going broke every seven or eight years on the farm.

Reichert:
In a few short decades the Bureau of Reclamation had built more than 600 storage and diversion dams in 17 western states, with a carrying capacity of 134 million acre feet of water. The Bureau had virtually remade the map of the West.

But by the 1970’s, cracks began appearing in the iron triangle.

The environmental movement was beginning to blossom.

And economists were arguing that, many of the new reclamation projects were lousy investments.

And then an event in Idaho’s own backyard shook the confidence of the Bureau to its very foundation.

For years, irrigators in eastern Idaho had coveted the waters of the Teton River. Occasional flooding merely helped to increase the demand for a dam.

The project had its opponents, however, people like Russ Brown who fervently believed the dam was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Russ Brown, Environmentalist:
The Bureau had a history of faking justifications for project. That was their way of life. And Congress was glad enough to go along with it, especially if they could wink at it by not knowing too much. And in this case, of course, nobody was told what the potential hazards at that site might have been, including that huge cavern that was 40 feet high, big enough to drive a truck into and of undetermined depth.

Reichert:
Construction of the dam started in 1972. From the beginning, the Bureau made some design and construction decisions that later proved disastrous.

Perry Swisher:
I’ll never know why they changed the aggregate, why somebody thought that crushed black rock would perform the same function as gravel. That’s not characteristic of the Bureau. And I’ll never know why those specs were changed within the Bureau bureaucracy.

Reichert:
Workers found cracks permeating the porous volcanic walls surrounding the dam. Eventually they gave up pumping grout into one large gap.

The dam’s reservoir filled to the brim in the spring of 1976, much faster than expected. Leaks started to appear the morning of June 5.

Andrus:
About 11 o’clock they called me out for a phone call from the state police advising me that the Teton Dam had just broken.

Devastation all over the place. A massive wall of water that hit and tore that town apart.

Reichert:
The residents of Wilford had only a few minutes of warning before 80 million gallons of water ripped through their homes.

Eleven people died and flood waters decimated many communities and destroyed thousands of acres of farmland.

The flood cost American taxpayers almost half a billion dollars. The damage to the Bureau of Reclamation was harder to calculate.

Andrus:
They didn’t care about the environment, they didn’t care about the fishery, they didn’t care about anything other than building those structures to prove to their mother that when they went to engineering school that by golly they could do the job. And I don’t find fault with that. But things and times change, and they did not change with it.

Russ Brown:
Essentially the river has reclaimed itself. And what man did, nature took back. Unfortunately it was the cost of 400 million dollars in damages and eleven human lives, lives that were lost needlessly by an act of nature but as a byproduct of the acts of men.

Reichert:
The failure of the Teton Dam accelerated the push to overhaul the mission of the Bureau.

John Keys:
The change in going from the civil works agency to the water management agency all over the Bureau was tough.

We had been the premier engineering agency for a long time; we knew how to build dams; we knew how to build civil works better than anybody and we were world renowned, we were all over the world doing that; we knew how to manage water and we did manage water; but it said that’s going to be your focus, and there were some people during that change that had a hard time with that

Reichert:
In fact, many took early retirement. Others, like Keys, looked to the private sector for a model. They found it in the March of Dimes, an organization originally dedicated to finding the cure for polio, but which has continued to flourish even after polio was eradicated.

Keys:
We used them as a role model on how they changed. And if you look at the parallels, there’s a lot of familiarity there.

Reichert:
But it’s one thing to pick a different disease to raise funds for, and quite another to change the mission of a federal agency.

John Freemuth, Political Scientist, B.S.U.:
That’s a pretty important question and I think it’s really an open ended answer about whether they’re going to be successful at it. It probably requires their culture to change fundamentally. I mean, quite frankly, engineers probably shouldn’t be running that Bureau anymore if they’re going to be in the business of water quality management and water resource management.

So you really have to intervene and change their culture fundamentally in a lot of ways. There are other agencies who are certainly not interested in losing their turf to a Bureau that’s decided it wants to be a little bit greener.

Reichert:
Today, the Bureau calls itself an innovative water management agency devoted to developing and protecting water resources.

What this means is that water conservation projects now get top billing, along with environmental protection and restoration projects, aimed at repairing the harm caused by the Bureau’s dams.

But in parts of southern Idaho, where the Bureau of Reclamation once could do no wrong, the feeling persists that maybe this federal agency took a wrong turn.

From his command post, Randy Bingham directs the destiny of southern Idaho’s Burley Irrigation District.

Thirteen miles of gravity canals divert water from the Snake River to this site.

The water is then raised 30 feet and sent down two different canals to be parsed out to 1300 water users.

The Bureau built this pumping plant back in 1905, with the assistance of Bingham’s grandfather.

Randy Bingham, Manager, Burley Irrigation District:
When the Bureau of Reclamation was first organized, it was designed to build projects like this one, pumping plants, dams, they were very good at it.

Today they’ve decided that they don’t want to build any more dams and they’re looking for something to keep them alive.

They have seen how powerful they used to be and how powerful the Environmental Protection Agency is today, and they think maybe over there is the right place to be at. And so they’re moving a little bit that direction.

I don’t believe we need another Environmental Protection Agency. They take care of the environment. The Bureau of Reclamation was very good at what it did and still is needed.

We’re not done with water shortages, we’re not done with population growth; we’re going to need more water.

They need to refine their expertise and stay in the business they’re good at.

Reichert:
As much as things have changed, there are still some traditions left in the Bureau. And Jo Gordon is one of them. She’s a damtender. Her charge: Arrowrock, one of the oldest Reclamation dams in the West, and the lynchpin of the Boise River system.

Jo Gordon, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation:
I’ve probably got the best job in the world. I live in a place that’s just beautiful and the work I do is work that I enjoy doing.

Reichert:
Living above Arrowrock, Gordon is one of only three full time damtenders left in Idaho’s Reclamation system.

Each day is filled with certain routines, like measuring the reservoir level.

Gordon:
Okay, that will be 56.96.

Reichert:
The number is used to calculate what type of adjustments are needed to keep the water at the right height.

Gordon:
Okay, I have six valves at full open and one at 86 percent. That means I need to turn my dial to 62.

Reichert:
Then Gordon descends the hundreds of steps into Arrowrock itself, where turn of the century valves control the water that shoots through the dam.

Gordon:
These aren’t too bad. The ones that are bad are the drum gates.

Reichert:
She adjusts the valves to let more or less water through the dam, lowering and raising the reservoir behind it.

It’s definitely a manual operation, one of the last in the system.

But it works.

When Gordon first started her job, there were some scary moments.

Gordon:
The first time I turned one on, a huge gush of water came up from the pipe down here and I thought I had broke something. I didn’t know what to do. I was ready to find the ladder and get out.

But come to find out, that’s a normal thing. That’s the way they work.

Reichert:
Now the cool, dark dam is a peaceful place for her.

Gordon:
I love it. I think it is so unique. It’s kind of like walking around in the bottom part of a castle.

Reichert:
And all alone, sometimes she’ll just test all the silence by whooping it up.

Gordon:
Just the noise it makes. You know, when you were a kid and you used to make echoes and this, that, and the other, I never grew out of it.

Reichert:
For Gordon, a cancer survivor, the surroundings outside Arrowrock have also helped her recovery.

Gordon:
I sit back and listen to the quiet. I think it has helped me more than a lot of other things that I could be doing.

Reichert:
Soon though, Arrowrock won’t need a damtender.

Like many of the other facilities on the system, it will be controlled from here, Black Canyon Dam in Emmett.

No more stairs, no more cranky valves. With the simple click of a mouse, operators here can make gates move hundreds of miles away.

Someone has to make those decisions, in the first place.

That job falls to Rick Wells.

Using data collected from snow surveys, Wells keeps tabs on the amount of water in the mountains near Boise.

But not just a few mountains, Wells has to monitor conditions in a 2700 square mile area. That’s because all the snowpack, eventually 2 million acre feet of water will end up in the Boise River watershed.

The storage capacity behind the dams though, is under a million acre feet, so decisions must be made. How much of the water should be let out down the river in the spring for flood control, and how much should be stored behind the dams for irrigators to use later in the summer.

Wells works with his counterpart at the Army Corps of Engineers to make the decision.

Rick Wells, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation:
What I thought on the Arrowrock release, you know, I’d hold it where it is, and let Lucky Peak come on up to 30, 35, because at that elevation they have, the marina is fully usable. We have these two goals that are actually conflicting. One is to try and minimize the flood threat and the other is to fill the reservoir system. So if we let out too much water too early, and then don’t refill the system, there’s real hardship that results from that.

Reichert:
But floods also cause hardship. This is what Wells is trying to avoid.

In 1997, a sudden snowmelt and then a massive rainstorm caused flooding in eastern Idaho. Back in Boise, Wells and the Army Corps of Engineers had kept enough room in the reservoirs to avoid a crisis.

Wells:
We had three peaks that year, that were in the top three runoff peaks in the basin, but we drank them in the reservoir system, and people didn’t know that we had that hellish of a flood going on.

Reichert:
But some houses in the flood plain still got wet. Wells says it’s only a matter of time before Mother Nature presents a situation that cannot be controlled.

Wells:
Lots of people that because we have dams on the Boise River that that is going to provide an ironclad protection against flooding, and that’s not the case. So people who live in a flood plain are living at risk.

Reichert:
In addition to flood worries, Wells has to make sure there is enough water for irrigators, who have first rights to it.

And at the same time, there also are concerns about having enough water for fish, and wildlife, and recreation.

Wells:
It seems like no matter how much water there is, there is even more demands because of so many conflicting interests. There is yet another need that is surfacing for water supplies for urban growth and all this water is spoken for. So we’re going to be caught in a bind in trying to supply that.

Reichert:
Canal companies are watching the situation closely.

Lee Cisco, District 63 Watermaster:
We’re still irrigating 300 thousand plus acres in this valley so the farmers are just as dependent on water as they ever have been. Now you have the other side which is the domestic side and other environmental or endangered species issues that are also wanting a share of that water. And someday we’re probably going to have to collide and see who comes out on top.

Reichert:
Susan Stacy is a historian who has followed the development of the Bureau of Reclamation in the Boise valley.

Susan Stacy, Historian:
At first it was just the irrigators and nobody questioned that. It was a unanimous vote, nobody had anything else on their mind. And in the last 30 or 40 years that has changed very dramatically.

Reichert:
And no matter how hard he works to juggle all those concerns, Rick Wells still hears complaining.

Wells:
Two complaints: one is letting out too much water too early, and the other complaint is not letting out enough water early enough. And sometimes we get those complaints back to back in the same day.

It’s stressful and over the years I’ve personally, you know, learned to deal with it a lot better. I think four of five years ago I really did have a lot of trouble sleeping and worried a great deal. And now I’ve become more accustom to it and a little more confident.

Reichert:
Back at Arrowrock, Jo Gordon enjoys a lifestyle that is fast disappearing.

Gordon:
It’s kind of sad in a way. It’s going to make the dams better, but not having the people there makes a difference too.

It’s just really, it’s a good life.

Reichert:
It’s said the future of the West is written in water. If that’s the case, Idaho’s future could be a contentious one. There was a time when water arguments were settled by simply finding more water, but no longer.

In fact, the judge who has guided the water rights court proceeding says demands on water exceed supply. And that the loser in all this is going to be the small farmer, the very one who almost 100 years ago, the Bureau of Reclamation was created to save.

Dan Hurlbutt, Former Snake River Adjudication Judge:
I think the small family farmer is going to be put to a real test and not just because of the economy, but because of Idaho water policies that simply have let them down, let them down by allowing for over allocation of the resource, let them down by taking positions vis a vis the federal government that are expensive, and ultimately it will be the little guy whose pocket gets picked if you will. The small Idaho farmer may become an endangered species, much in the same sense that salmon are, and I think its regrettable and unfortunate.

Reichert:
Looming ominously over the debate about water is whether Congress or regulatory agencies can trump the state’s constitutionally guaranteed water rights.

Many irrigators fear the nation’s Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act could be used to deplete Idaho reservoirs.

In fact, some preliminary plans call for flushing billions of gallons of Idaho water down Idaho’s rivers to aid the migration of juvenile salmon. That’s water currently available for other uses.

Keys:
How are we going to come up with the right balance of how to use that water? That’s the challenge for the 21st century. Is irrigation the best use of it? Maybe. Is municipal supply the best use? Maybe. Is industrial supply for computers the highest and best use? Maybe. Fish and game, recreation, I mean it goes on and on. That’s the challenge to us and to the state, how to make the best use of it for the people in the state of Idaho. It’s a heck of a challenge and no easy answers.

Reichert:
To those who think about it, the West is a land where life is written in water. Water determines who wins and who loses.

The West is also a land of illusion. It is easy to forget that much of the West would be uninhabitable were it not for the structures of the Bureau of Reclamation.

And yet these days there is more talk of breaching dams than of building new ones. And so in this changing environment the Bureau of Reclamation is hoping to chart a new course.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.