NOVEL THINKING

The Grand Coulee Dam School District's Supplemental Educational Programs and Operation passed with 51% of the vote last Tuesday. It is roughly three times the size of Grand Coulee. The Bureau awarded a $100 million contract to refurbish three of the generators to the Austrian engineering firm Andritz.

Initial excavation for what was officially "Public Works Project No. 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. A more tempered assessment was offered in a report released in November 2000 by the World Commission on Dams. President Roosevelt’s New Deal planners envisioned opening up land for 10,000 farms. 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. At the same time, topsoil in the Northwest began to blow away. Approval for that would not come until 1943, and work would not begin on it for several more years. This Thursday, October 17, we’ll be at La Presa Restaurant at noon and… GRAND COULEE DAM AREA … One huge cloud enveloped a Hawaii-bound ocean liner 600 miles from Seattle.

Scrambling to legitimize the 20-some federal dams that were already being built through the PWA -- including Grand Coulee -- the Roosevelt administration pushed a new Rivers and Harbors bill through Congress.

The first of the dam’s primary generators went on line in October 1941. The power generated by a high dam, eight times more than the low dam, would be used, he believed. Whatever its impacts, good or ill, "the likelihood that Grand Coulee Dam will ever be removed is practically nil," the report concluded. All the men involved agreed to keep the investigation secret, for fear of being laughed out of town. The study, directed by John S. Butler, district engineer in the Army Corps of Engineers’ office in Seattle, was still underway in 1929 when a drought lowered stream flows in the Puget Sound region, crippling the production of electricity at existing dams. Soon, the battle was joined between the “pumpers” and the “ditchers.”. Grand Coulee impounds a reservoir, Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, named for the president who authorized construction of the dam, which began in 1933 (see construction photos). Tourists still come to marvel at Grand Coulee – "the biggest thing yet built by human hands," as Woody Guthrie put it -- but the central question has shifted. O’Sullivan, Woods, Clapp and many other local people favored pumping water from behind a dam; influential business leaders in Spokane, home of the privately owned Washington Water Power Company, which owned its own hydroelectric dams, favored canals that would divert water from the Pend Oreille River in northeastern Washington.

Today, Grand Coulee continues to be the big workhorse of the Federal Columbia River Power System; its outflow affects generation at all of the Columbia River dams downstream. Slides would be a continuing problem throughout the construction period, forcing the relocation of roads and railroads. Called Mason City (in honor of Silas Mason, one of the three primary contractors), it was designed to be the world’s first "all electric city" -- a model that would demonstrate the wonders of electricity and help create a market for the power to be generated by the dam. Montana & Wyoming.

Despite the subsidy, Northwest power users still enjoy the lowest rates for electricity in the nation because of Grand Coulee and other federal dams on the Columbia.

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. Still, it was a start. Pumpers like O’Sullivan saw potential benefits in hydropower. It’s going to be a working pyramid" (Morgan, 18). The Columbia had become less a river than a series of flabby reservoirs. A cycle of unusually heavy rainfall (18 to 20 inches a year instead of the usual five to 12 inches) brought more farmers to the region in the early 1900s. "We're still quite proud of the dam," said Diana Cross, a spokeswoman for the bureau. The federal project not only conformed with New Deal principles, it also conformed with Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s intentions that public relief projects should help the national recovery and create a valuable product able to pay for itself. Electricity from Grand Coulee flowed to aluminum plants, aircraft factories, shipyards, and other defense-related industries in the Northwest. However, Roosevelt balked at the scale of the project. Federal agencies began looking for ways to keep water in the river -- rather than take it out -- in an effort to protect endangered salmon and steelhead. The only road was a gravel road that snaked around to a few isolated ranches. The dam has four power plants. Skilled laborers, such as carpenters and electricians, received up to $1.20 an hour. Note: This essay was corrected on December 14, 2006, to state that Jim James was a chief of the San Poil Tribe, a constituent tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Like most members of his generation, Guthrie regarded an undammed river as a resource going to waste. The trade journal Pacific Builder and Engineer reported that the project "has involved to date a steady succession of construction feats without precedent in the annals of the industry." Grand Coulee Dam, hailed as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" when it was completed in 1941, is as confounding to the human eye as an elephant might be to an ant. This was a blow to the ditchers. The researchers estimated that the subsidy amounts to at least $58 million a year. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies supported the concept of multiple purposes dams — dams that generate power and also provide water for irrigation, recreation and flood control. 463-480; Dan Hansen, "Dam Couldn’t be Built Today," Spokesman Review (Spokane), April 12, 1995, p. A-8; Hal Bernton, "Grand Coulee: Proud Accomplishment, Serious Trade-Offs," The Seattle Times, November 17, 2000, p. A-3; Jonathan Brinckman, "Study Draws Lessons from Grand Coulee," The Oregonian, January 14, 2000, p. A-1; "Grand Coulee Dam Revisited," editorial, The Oregonian, January 24, 2000, p. C-2.

When the dry years returned, the plight of these early settlers added to the pressure to find a reliable way to irrigate the fertile but arid land. Grand Coulee Dam, hailed as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" when it was completed in 1941, is as confounding to the human eye as an elephant might be to an ant. Even so, if the designers of Grand Coulee had had to comply with current environmental laws, the Columbia might still be flowing freely in Central Washington. Modernizing all 18 generating units in the Left and Right Powerhouses is anticipated to take approximately 10 years to complete. The benefits of reclamation, Pitzer writes, "were viewed as positive conservation measures in their day.". Peach FoundationWashington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Map showing dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers and their tributaries, Courtesy Center for Columbia River History, Grand Coulee Dam under construction, ca.

They initially hoped that a large-scale irrigation system in the Columbia Basin could be built by the state government. Grand Coulee began generating statistics and superlatives long before it produced any electricity: more than 22 million cubic yards of "overburden" (layers of soil and rocks above bedrock) removed from the damsite; 30 million board feet of lumber cut from 50,000 acres of land in the prospective lake bottom; 9,500 tons of steel used in the framework for the dam. Plans to dam the last 50-mile stretch of free-flowing Columbia, on the Hanford Reach near Pasco, were defeated, as were efforts to expand the Columbia Basin Project area (from 550,000 to 1.1 million acres). The Butler Report, released by the Army Corps of Engineers in March 1932, 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. If the dam had been built, it would have limited the size of the dam at Grand Coulee 110 miles downriver, effectively killing the pumping proposal.

The two power plants, each of which houses nine large generators, are split by the spillway, which is 1,300 feet wide and covers an area of 13.26 acres. The ditchers wanted to irrigate the Columbia Basin with water from the Pend Oreille River. Groundbreaking ceremonies took place on July 16, 1933. They expected these farms to support 80,000 people, nearly all of them relocated from the "Dust Bowl" in the Midwest. The conveyer was soon carrying 52,000 cubic yards a day.

One of the first, if not the first, published reports of a proposal to irrigate the Columbia Plateau with water from the Columbia River was in 1892, when the Coulee City News and The Spokesman-Review reported on a scheme by a man named Laughlin McLean to build a 1,000-foot-tall dam to divert the entire flow of the Columbia back into the Grand Coulee; he also earlier proposed a 95-mile canal across the Columbia Plateau from a diversion point somewhere farther upriver. Also see this video on Grand Coulee's construction. For more information, contact Pam Druliner, Project Manager, at 208-378-6214 or via email at pdruliner@usbr.gov . From there, the water would be siphoned into a labyrinth of tunnels and canals. The federal Reclamation Service and the state of Washington had spent thousands of dollars looking for ways to provide irrigation; a 1914 bond measure that would have paid for irrigating a portion of the area had failed. About 400 isolated farms and 10 small communities -- with a total population of between 3,000 and 4,000 -- were forced to relocate from areas flooded by the dam.

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