If built to its full extent, a large dam could even help pay for its own cost, as electricity could be sold to the surrounding areas. Sullivan, the project would be worthy of consideration as a purely irrigation enterprise. But with the great depletion of the fuel and oil supplies of the country, the development of electrical energy to the amount of 1,, horsepower up to a tremendous total of 3,, horsepower becomes added interest.
The Dam would place the Smythe home completely underwater, though Smythe was quoted as saying "Let 'er come. I've got me a piece of ground back yonder from the high water mark and I've got most of my house already built on it. The water can't get here too quick to suite me. It will be just like living on a lake. Despite the overwhelming positives of constructing the dam, there were several obstacles that delayed construction.
The idea of building a dam to help with irrigation challenges was first proposed in a copy of the Coulee City News in One plan aimed to use artesian wells to irrigate the Columbia Basin, while a more popular idea was to build a long gravity canal from lakes in Idaho for irrigation. The debate between building a dam versus constructing a gravity canal lasted for nearly fifteen years until the October , when the proposal to build a dam won the support of the Army Corp of Engineers. Even after the long-awaited army report settled the debate over the most effective method of irrigating the Columbia Basin, the biggest challenge still remained.
Securing the necessary funding to build a structure of the size and complexity of the Grand Coulee Dam proved to be a major challenge. In the early s, farmers tried to grow crops in the fertile soils of Central Washington. Inadequate rainfall was a problem but the abundance of water in the Columbia River was the answer.
The solution was to build a concrete dam across the Columbia River to raise the water level and divert it south into the Grand Coulee, an immense natural channel which was carved by the Ice Age Floods. The Bureau of Reclamation was placed in charge of the project. On July 16, , the first stake was driven into place, initiating a nine-year construction project to build the largest structure in the world.
Groundbreaking ceremonies took place on July 16, , just days before funds were approved for another dam on the Columbia River--the huge Bonneville Dam, to be built downstream by the Corps of Engineers.
Many other dams would follow on the Columbia, which traces its headwaters to the Canadian Rockies. The river crosses into the United States in eastern Washington and flows miles through the state before taking a big turn west, forming the border with Oregon as it heads toward the Pacific Ocean.
Originally, Grand Coulee was to be a low dam with plans to raise it higher at a later time. Other towns sprang up, including Engineers Town, built by Reclamation to house its engineers, and the rowdy Grand Coulee, known for its taverns and gambling halls. From the town of Odair, rails extended to the construction site, where MWAK used an innovative conveyor belt, rather than trucks, to carry the tons of rock and earth excavated each day.
The dam, as well, was to be built in two sections--west and east. That summer MWAK constructed two cement plants, one for each side of the dam, capable of producing cubic yards or , gallons of concrete every hour. As workers excavated, exposing the bedrock foundation for the dam, others drilled test holes from 30 to feet deep.
Then, men were lowered into the holes to inspect the quality of the rock. Twenty to foot deep grout holes also were drilled; the grout pumped in to provide a secure seal beneath the dam.
Concrete placement began in the fall of but, as winter set in, the air turned so cold that several concrete pours actually froze and had to be blasted away and replaced. In January, concrete work halted altogether until spring, when it picked up again, only to halt again the next winter, then pick up in the spring and summer at ever increasing speeds, setting several records for concrete placement.
Nearly 11, men worked more than 27 million hours to divert the river, excavate the foundation, and place concrete. The possibility of a dam at Grand Coulee surfaced as early as The coulee was a deep, narrow canyon that served as a channel for the Columbia River during the last Ice Age, when glaciers diverted the river from its original bed.
Under the Reclamation Act of , the United States Reclamation Service later the Bureau of Reclamation had the ability to initiate large-scale irrigation projects in the West. The government investigated several irrigation schemes for the Columbia Basin but showed little enthusiasm for any of them. The Reclamation Service said it was too expensive. Among those who lamented the defeat of the bond issue was William "Billy" Clapp , a lawyer in the small town of Ephrata.
Clapp became convinced that whatever nature had done with ice in prehistoric times modern man could do with concrete. In the summer of , he and a few other local men asked the Grant County commissioners to authorize a study to see how high a new dam would have to be to push the Columbia back into the Grand Coulee. All the men involved agreed to keep the investigation secret, for fear of being laughed out of town.
He buried the story on page seven. Still, in typically flamboyant style, he reported that "The latest, newest; the most ambitious idea in the way of reclamation and development of water power ever formulated is now in process of development.
By , backers of a Columbia Basin irrigation project had divided into two camps. The so-called "gravity plan," advocated by a group of businessmen in Spokane, involved damming the Pend Oreille River in Idaho and diverting the water to eastern Washington through some miles of gravity-fed canals, tunnels, aqueducts, and reservoirs.
In contrast, the "pumping plan" -- proposed by Clapp and championed by Woods -- called for the construction of a foot-tall dam on the Columbia. Power generated by the dam would be used to operate gigantic pumps to lift water from the reservoir and move it uphill to a storage lake formed by damming both ends of the Grand Coulee. From there, the water would be siphoned into a labyrinth of tunnels and canals. Later that year, the Washington Legislature stepped into what was becoming an increasingly contentious debate and established a Columbia Basin Survey Commission to study the two plans.
In a report released in July , the Commission declared that a dam at Grand Coulee was not feasible and recommended the gravity plan instead. The two sides continued to argue for years. Meanwhile, neither scheme moved closer to reality. As historian Paul C. Pitzer has pointed out, few of the key players in this drama actually lived on or farmed land in the Columbia River Basin. They were lawyers, businessmen, promoters, and politicians who believed agricultural expansion would lead to industrial and urban growth.
Most were conservatives who deeply resented "big government. Over time, they accepted the fact that only the federal government could undertake a project of such scale. The study, directed by John S. At the same time, topsoil in the Northwest began to blow away. In April pillars of dust reaching 5, feet into the sky swept down the Columbia Basin and out to the Pacific Ocean.
One huge cloud enveloped a Hawaii-bound ocean liner miles from Seattle. These developments added to the political pressure for a reclamation project in the Columbia Basin. The Butler Report, released by the Army Corps of Engineers in March , favored the pumping plan, largely because the sale of electricity from a dam at Grand Coulee would offset the cost of delivering water for irrigation.
Dill of Spokane, closed ranks in an effort to get the necessary federal financing. However, conservative legislators and private power interests strenuously opposed the dam, calling it a waste of money and predicting that it would glut the market with electricity that no one would want to buy. Francis D. By , the continuing Depression provided a new justification for federal dams on the Columbia: putting people to work.
Newly elected President Franklin D.
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