Today, the [Bureau of Reclamation] claims a $1.4 billion budget to maintain its fleet of aging dams. It was perhaps inevitable that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would seek to cut it down. Approximately 400 workers at the bureau—including dam tenders, emergency management specialists, and hydrologists—received “reduction in force” letters in March raising fears that poorly monitored dams could fail, creating catastrophic downstream flooding.
Turmoil in the federal dam management system represents potential disaster, but also a prime opportunity: It offers environmentalists an opening to make a vigorous case for dam removal—a move that could save costs and please business interests while achieving a longstanding goal of getting rid of the most harmful and obsolete blockages on Western rivers. The key, one vivid example suggests, is making a scientific initiative attractive in the political realm.
At a place called Fossil Creek in the high country of north-central Arizona, a gorgeous waterfall now tumbles near headwaters where an Arizona Public Service (APS) hydroelectric dam stood until 2005. Ask people swimming below the falls where the dam was located, and you’ll get some puzzled looks. “There was never any dam here,” said one, unaware he was standing right next to its remnants, masonry concealed under travertine deposits that give it every appearance of a natural falls.
Arizona built the dam in 1916 to run the ore-crushers at nearby copper and gold mines at Jerome and Crown King. Eventually, the dam also powered streetlights in Phoenix. But by the end of the century, the river had been killed and the antique plant was providing only .002% of APS’s total revenue. So APS took 14 feet off the top of the dam and let Fossil Creek flow, and a once-dead waterway sprang back to magnificent life.
Add new comment