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Grand Coulee Dam revisited by Editorial, The Oregonian - 24 January 2000 An international study on Washington state's Grand Coulee Dam makes it clear that such a massive public-works project probably couldn't be built today because the environmental and social impacts of such an undertaking are too severe.Times have changed in this region - and throughout the world -regarding public awareness of and sensitivity to the environmental consequences of projects that change the natural order of our rivers and streams. The Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1941, included no compromises or mitigation for fish. Virtually no studies were done on the impact on fisheries. Communities of people and interest groups were excluded from the decision process. The dam simply ended salmon runs in the upper Columbia, and forced Native Americans to change their diets and their lifestyles. But over the last 59 years, Grand Coulee Dam's regional value far exceeded its environmental and social impacts. Grand Coulee Darn empowered the Northwest. It generates more electricity than any other U.S. dam. It provided cheap electricity for the aerospace and aluminum industries that helped win World War 11, and it fueled much of the region's postwar economic expansion. As a result of this project and other Columbia River Basin federal dams, the Northwest still enjoys the cheapest power rates in the nation. And the abundance of this federal hydropower has meant that the region didn't have to turn to other forms of electricity, such as coal- or oil-buming generators that contribute to air pollution, or to a heavy reliance on nuclear power stations. Yet power production wasn't the primary purpose for Grand Coulee. It was built to create farms in the Columbia Basin desert. Water from Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind the dam, spreads over 530,000 acres, producing twice the crop dollar value that Depression-era planners predicted. The study's authors note that Northwest residents pay at least $58 million a year to subsidize irrigation. That estimate includes the cost of pumping water from the Columbia River and a "conservative estimate" of the additional energy that could be produced if the water were left in the river. But that cost has been repaid many times over in taxes from the growers and in jobs created in agriculture-related industries in and Eastern Washington. The study's authors were careful to distinguish their Grand Coulee study from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers evaluation of four federal dams on the lower Snake River. They emphasized they were looking for lessons learned from the Grand Coulee experience, not arguments about other dams, such as the four Snake River dams considered for removal. But the study of the Northwest's largest public project, with its vast costs and vast benefits, reminds us that impacts have two sides. A single-minded consideration on either side would breach more than a dam.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 The World Commission on Dams | ||||||||||||||||||||||
