The war on terror has a new
front in southwestern Colorado. Outside the fast-growing city of
Durango, the government has allocated $2 million for terrorism
security at the Animas-La Plata Dam construction site. How will
that money specifically ward off al-Qaida operatives and increase
homeland security?
“If I tell you too much, I’d
have to kill you,” project manager Patrick Schumacher told
The Durango Herald last September, making a
point with grim humor. “It’s a direct result of 9-11.”
Of course, he was joking — or was he? Dams stand as
potential terrorist targets. But the Animas-La Plata Project,
better known as A-LP, isn’t even built yet. Still, for many
critics, nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of A-LP
itself.
Congress originally authorized the Bureau of
Reclamation to build the Animas-La Plata dam and pumping project in
1968. The project entailed pumping water from the Animas River
1,000 feet over a divide into the La Plata River, then storing it
in a series of reservoirs and sending it to farmers through 48
miles of canals and pipelines for low-value crops like alfalfa. The
Rube Goldberg nature of the scheme and the hundreds of millions of
dollars it would have cost infuriated river-lovers and fiscal
conservatives, who fought A-LP in its various forms for the next
three decades.
By 1995, the dam had still not been built,
and U.S. News and World Report called the
project the “last surviving dinosaur from the age of behemoth water
schemes.”
The Bureau of Reclamation determined that the
project’s costs astronomically outweighed its benefits
— A-LP would return only 36 cents for each dollar spent
— yet the agency continued to back the plan. In some college
courses on resource management, the Animas La Plata Project became
a textbook example of bureaucratic survival strategies. The lesson:
A government agency, in this case the Bureau of Reclamation, often
does anything it can to ensure its survival and continue an
outmoded mission — despite high costs to the taxpayer.
Dam proponents unwilling to concede failure scaled back
the original plan in the late ‘90s and, as environmental
critics put it bluntly, “wrapped the dam in an Indian blanket.” The
redefinition meant that water from the project would go to two Ute
Indian tribes, which had 19th century water rights, but no water.
The tribes will likely use their new water to grow their
own low-value crops, or else sell it to coal-fired power plants
that pollute the desert skies with sulfur and carbon dioxide. There
were other changes in the new operating version of A-LP: It reduced
its take of water from the Animas River to limit negative impacts
on endangered fish, proposed an off-site reservoir, and cut the La
Plata River out of the project.
Water from the dam will
still go to non-Indians for irrigation as well as to meet the
growth explosion in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico,
where population is projected to increase as much as 50 percent
over the next 25 years.
These changes to the project
convinced Congress to finally allocate money for actual
construction. The Bureau of Reclamation won approval for a $338
million project budget in 2000, and went to work blasting and
digging in 2002. By last July, the agency announced cost
projections had raised to project’s cost closer to $500
million, and these overruns could jump higher, since construction
is still underway.
Frustrated by 35 years of resistance
and scrutiny, and hoping to avoid further embarrassment and
holdups, Reclamation Commissioner John Keys told reporters last
December, “I just don’t want any more land mines.” The remark
probably referred to figurative obstacles, but Reclamation still
got $2 million for anti-terrorism protection. That expense pales in
comparison to the $160 million overrun so far.
The
projected total cost of a half-billion dollars for the project
— not including four decades of court battles and
environmental studies — makes this dam a significant
plundering of the public treasury. The project may also be the swan
song of a government agency struggling to carve out a new mission
for itself, now that Americans have decided that the costs of a
modern dam are too great to be borne.
Meanwhile, the
critics keep protesting the project, and many are terrified at the
way A-LP will accelerate growth in the region. It makes you wonder
why a terrorist, who wants to harm America, would try to sabotage
A-LP?
Josh Zaffos is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org), where he lives and writes.
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