The Dammed - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 158

Much of the midlife success of the Bureau of Reclamation's dam builders can be at-
tributed to Floyd Dominy , the ur-Water Buffalo who served as commissioner of re-
clamation from 1959 to 1969. Dominy's world-view was defined by a search for water.
Raised on an isolated, parched ranch in Nebraska, he grew into a Stetson-wearing,
cigar-chomping, profane rancher-politician and indefatigable self-promoter. To the dis-
may of environmentalists, he was a shrewd operator who held great sway in both the hot
deserts of the West and the cool marbled hallways of Congress. Almost every project he
favored got built. He was responsible for the Yellowtail Dam, the Trinity Dam, Flaming
Gorge Dam, Navajo Dam, and most famously—and infamously—Glen Canyon Dam,
which impounded the Upper Colorado to create Lake Powell, on the Utah/Arizona bor-
der.
Dominy's foes were legion. The most vociferous of them came from the increasingly
powerful environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, led by charismatic evan-
gelicals such as David Brower, the Sierra Club's first executive director, and Mark Reis-
ner, author of CadillacDesert. Dominy alternately ignored Brower and his ilk or de-
bated them with great relish—most famously when he accompanied Brower on a raft
trip down the Colorado River, during which they argued the merits of damming the
river as they splashed through white-water rapids, a scene recounted in John McPhee's
topic Encounters with the Archdruid.
By the late 1970s, however, the Bureau of Rec was confronted by a series of shifts in
the public mood that conspired to diminish its scope and alter its focus from construc-
tion of new projects to management of existing ones. In the 1960s and 1970s, environ-
mentalists became newly energized and well funded. Rachel Carson's 1962 topic, Silent
Spring,drew attention to chemical pollution, while Paul Ehrlich's PopulationBomb,of
1968, addressed the question of how many people the earth can sustain. Anxiety over
nuclear radiation began with the poisoning of fishermen after a nuclear test in the Bikini
Atoll in 1954 and peaked with the partial meltdown of a reactor at the Three Mile Is-
land nuclear plant in 1979. Concern about oil spills, acid rain, and mercury poisoning
built support for new laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973,
which hindered the Bureau of Rec's infrastructure-building projects. Public perception
of dams was beginning to change, too.
Teton Dam was a $100 million earth-and-rock-filled structure built by the Bureau
of Rec in 1975 to impound the Teton River, in southeastern Idaho. On June 5, 1976, it
collapsed, killing eleven people and thirteen thousand head of cattle, and causing some
$2 billion worth of damage. (It was not rebuilt, although the Bureau has considered it.)
In the intervening years, water management was becoming a flash point between
powerful constituencies—agriculture, industry, cities, Native American tribes, recre-