The Public Be Dammed

"The Army Corps Of Engineers is public enemy number one." I spoke those words at the annual meeting of the Great Lakes Chapter of the Sierra Club, early in 1968; and that summary supplied an exclamation point to a long discussion of the manner in which various Federal agencies despoil the public domain.

It is not easy to pick out public enemy number one from among our Federal agencies, for many of them are notorious despoilers and the competition is great for that position. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, like the Corps of Engineers, has an obsession for building dams, whether needed or not. Its present plan to wipe out the Little T River and its fertile valley is rampant vandalism. TVA is also probably the biggest strip miner in the country, using much coal for its stand-by steam (continued on page 182)The Public Be Dammed(continued from page 143) plants. The sulphuric acid that pours out of strip mines, ruining downstream waters, is TVA acid.

The Bureau of Mines sits on its hands in Washington, D. C., pretty much a captive agency of the coal-mine owners, and does precious little about stripmining.

The Public Roads Administration has few conservation standards; it goes mostly by engineering estimates of what is feasible and of cost. In the Pacific Northwest, it has ruined 50 trout streams through highway design. Everywhere---East and West---the Administration aims at the heart of parklands, because they need not be condemned, and plays fast and loose with parts of the public domain that were reserved for wildlife and outdoor recreation.

The list is long; and when the names of Federal agencies are all in, the balloting for public enemy number one will not be unanimous. But my choice of the Army Engineers has a powerful case to support it.

The Corps is one of our oldest Federal agencies. It is small and elite, highly political and very effective. It is honest and, with exceptions I will note, quite efficient. It is also largely autonomous and inconsiderate of the requirements of conservation and ecology.

There has been a recurring effort to get rid of it. The Hoover Commission Task Force on Water Resources and Power recommended in 1949 that the functions of the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation be transferred to the Secretary of a proposed Department of Natural Resources and consolidated there in an agency to be known as the Water Development Service. The training provided "in peacetime for the 215 Army engineers at present utilized on this civilian program can surely be secured in some far less costly fashion."

In 1966, Senators Joseph S. Clark, Lee Metcalf and Frank E. Moss sponsored a bill that would have turned the Department of the Interior into a Department of Natural Resources and transferred the Corps to that new department. But the power of the Corps is so strong that that bill died in committee. Indeed, Senators and Congressmen who are so bold as to urge that the Army Engineers be abolished find themselves wholly out of favor when it comes to projects for their states.

At the time of the Hoover Report, the budget of the Corps was about $440,000,000 a year. It is now 1.3 billion dollars and is expected to reach three billion dollars in the 1980s. So the Corps shows no sign of diminishing political influence.

Its specialty is in pork-barrel legislation on the Hill. It commonly outmaneuvers the President and has its way, irrespective of his wishes. The Corps gave F. D. R. one of his soundest political thrashings. The Corps also has few public critics; it has become one of the sacred cows of Washington.

The Corps farms out many of its research and development projects. There is hardly a Federal agency in Washington that is not offered a piece of it in amounts from $200,000 to $400,000 or more a year. Federal bureaucrats love that kind of money, for they do not have to depend on Congress for it. There is a rule of thumb in Washington that 15 percent of an amount obtained in an appropriation is used for permanent overhead. That means that if agency A receives $500,000 for research on siltation, water purification, or what not, it uses $75,000 to add to its permanent personnel and the rest for the current annual project. But agency A, like the other agency donees who receive funds from the Corps, is anxious to have a similar amount, year after year. Therefore, never do they raise their voices against ill-conceived projects; never, when the Corps is throwing its weight around and the public is protesting, do these Federal agencies align themselves with the people.

In the late Fifties, I was a member of a group of conservationists fighting the Corps on the huge River Bend Dam on the Potomac River. The dam was virtually useless as a power project and of no value for flood control. Its justification was the creation of a head of water that could be used to flush the polluted Potomac of sewage. Some of the huge Federal agencies were silently opposed; but none would speak up, for fear of losing the Corps' good will and its research and development funds. We ended by getting an independent engineering study that actually riddled the project. That dam---which would have flooded 80 miles of river and shown a drawdown of 35 vertical feet---would have been known in time as the nation's greatest folly. It would have despoiled a historic river; and the 35-foot vertical drawdown would have resulted in several hundred yards of stinking mud flats exposed to public view. Yet the Corps had the nerve to get a public-relations outfit to make an estimate as to the millions of tourists who would be drawn to this ugly mudhole from all over the East.

The Engineers gave up on River Bend and offered an alternative of an upstream dam at Seneca for water supply. Public hearings exposed its destructive qualities. It, too, would ruin a beautiful free-flowing river. Moreover, there was a growing awareness that dams for municipal water are unnecessary along the Potomac; for the estuary in front of Washington, which is 20 miles long and moved by the tides, contains billions of gallons of potable water, which is all the water the metropolitan area will ever need.

At the peak of its promotional activities along the Potomac, the Corps had plans for 16 big dams and 418 small ones. How many were actually discarded? I do not know. But their active promotion of Potomac-river dams has shrunk from 434 to 6. Those six are for water for metropolitan use---a needless expenditure, because of the ample supply of estuary water.

The estuary water is polluted, but so is the entire Potomac. Why not expend our energies and fortunes in building sewage-disposal plants, not dams that put fertile bottom lands under muddy waters from now to eternity and drive thousands from their homes?

As I said, the Corps sometimes turns out to be mightier than the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to draw the lines of authority governing the Corps quite sharply: If a project was primarily concerned with navigation or flood control, then the Army Corps of Engineers had jurisdiction; if, however, irrigation and power were the dominant features of the project, then the Bureau of Reclamation would be in charge. The matter came to a head in 1944, when the Kings River project and the Kern River project---both part of a development program for California's Great Central Valley---were before Congress. Roosevelt was firmly on record as having said, "I want the Kings and Kern River projects to be built by the Bureau of Reclamation and not by the Army Engineers."

But the Corps had its way before both the House and the Senate. Roosevelt countered by directing the Secretary of War to make no allocation of funds nor submit any estimate of appropriations without clearing the matter with the Bureau of the Budget. F. D. R. provided funds in his new budget only for the Bureau of Reclamation respecting these projects. But before the budget cleared the House, the Army Engineers got included in the budget funds for initial work on the projects.

F. D. R. signed the bill reluctantly, saying he would ask Congress to transfer jurisdiction over all these Central Valley projects to the Department of the Interior. Then he died and Truman took over the problem. The maneuvering against Truman was long and involved. In time, the Corps had pretty much its own way (A) by taking the stump against the White House in California to elicit the support of greedy landowners who wanted the benefit of irrigation without paying the costs as provided by law, and (B) by lobbying in Congress.

Every President has known something of the freewheeling nature of the Corps and its tendency to undercut the White House and curry favor with its friends on the Hill. Early in 1968, it was busy dodging the Bureau of the Budget on six Potomac dams and making its own recommendations to Congress. L. B. J., probably the dearest friend the Corps has had, tried to keep the Engineers in line. But the Corps is incorrigible, violating the fundamental principle that while an administrative agency is the creation of Congress, it must report through the Chief Executive, in order for a centralized, coordinated plan of administration to be successful. Even though the President advises that a Corps project is not in accord with White House policy, the Corps transmits its report to Congress anyway, sometimes, though not invariably, including in the transmittal a statement of the President's position. In this sense, the Corps is imperium in imperio, enjoying a status no other administrative agency has.

The Corps goes way back in our history, the present one dating from March 16, 1802. It is a small, elite group of officers, not many over 200 in number. But it supervises over 40,000 full-time civilian employees.

The permanent staff of civilian employees obtains its pay only when there is some public-works program to which the salary can be charged. That is why every civilian member is eager to suggest, initiate or create a role for the Corps that will keep everyone employed. In time of war, the Corps has military assignments, but its essential work over the years is concerned with civil functions. The Chief of Engineers is responsible to the Secretary of Defense regarding his civil duties and does not report to the Chief of Staff nor to any general. Actually, the Corps in operation is largely independent of the Secretary.

The committees of the House and Senate through which it operates are the Public Works committees. The inception of a Corps project starts with the Congressman or Senator representing the district where the project will be located. What member of Congress does not want $10,000,000 or, preferably, $100,000,000 coming into his district? He therefore tries to get the item included in an omnibus bill authorizing a preliminary examination. Once that is done, the preliminary examination may or may not be made. The appropriation is in a lump sum and there is usually not enough to make all the investigation authorized. So the Corps, at its own discretion, decides which has priority.

The Corps finally obtained by an act of Congress special permission to spend up to $10,000,000 on any project without approval by Congress, provided the project has been approved by resolutions adopted by the Senate and House committees. This is an advantage shared by no other Federal agency; and it is a measure of the rapport between Congress and the Army Engineers. Moreover, it gives the Corps a tremendous momentum. Once $5,000,000 or $10,000,000 is spent on a project, the pressure to get on with it and finish it is tremendous.

A member of Congress who is in good with the Corps will receive favors; those who may have been critical of it will be kept waiting. The game is boondoggling played for high stakes by clever, cunning men.

There are few members of Congress who do not early learn the lesson that an obsequious attitude pays off when it comes to pumping millions of dollars into a district that may save an election for a deserving Democrat or Republican but destroy a lovely free-flowing river.

The Corps operates in part through NRHC, the National Rivers and Harbors Congress. All members of Congress are ex-officio members of NRHC. Five of the 21 directors are members of Congress. Ten are national vice-presidents. The all-important operative committees are, with one exception, chaired by members of Congress. At its annual meeting, the National Rivers and Harbors Congress decides which rivers and harbors projects it should present to Congress; and then the Congressional members change hats and go to work lobbying one another.

One who is in a campaign opposed to the Corps has very few important allies. I remember the Buffalo River in Arkansas and the Saline River in the same state---both destined by the Army Engineers to be destroyed as free-flowing rivers. The Buffalo I knew well, as I had run it in canoes and fished for bass in shaded pools under its limestone cliffs. Much of the land bordering the Buffalo is marginal wood-lot acreage. Those who own that land were anxious to sell it for a song to Uncle Sam. Chambers of commerce blew their horns for "development" of the Buffalo. Bright pictures were drawn of motels built on the new reservoirs where fishing would abound and water-skiing would attract tourists.

The Corps had introduced Arkansas to at least 14 such river projects that buried free-flowing streams forever under muddy waters. The fishing is good for a few years. Then the silt covers the gravel bars where bass spawn and the gizzard shad---a notorious trash fish---takes over.

The people are left with the dead, muddy reservoirs. There is electric power, to be sure; but Arkansas already has many times the power that it can use. So why destroy the Buffalo? Why destroy the Saline?

What rivers are there left where man can float in solitude, fish, camp on sand-spits and rid himself of the tensions of this age? These are questions people are beginning to ask. And these questions eventually won over enough of the Arkansas delegation to save the Buffalo---at least temporarily---but the Saline is still in jeopardy.

Down in Kentucky last year, my wife and I led a protest hike against the plans of the Corps to build a dam that would flood the Red River Gorge. This gorge, which is on the north fork of Red River, is a unique form of wilderness that took wind and water some 60,000,000 years to carve out.

This is Daniel Boone country possessed by bear, deer and wild turkey. It has enough water for canoeing a few months out of the year. It is a wild, narrow, tortuous gorge that youngsters 100 years from now should have a chance to explore.

The gorge is only about 600 feet deep; but the drop in altitude in the narrow gulch produces a unique botanical garden. From March to November, a different wild flower blooms every day along the trails and across the cliffs.

This is wonderland to preserve, not to destroy.

Why should it be destroyed?

Flood control has been brought into the story; but it is a makeshift, for flood control could be achieved with a dam farther downstream that would preserve the gorge. The same can be said for water supply. The real reason: recreation. The Corps and promoters of the dam say that the reservoir will attract tourists who will spend their money in motels, lodges and boat docks. That's the way the dam was sold to the local people, who naïvely expect to get rich by the influx of tourists.

And so Red River Gorge was doomed for extinction until 1969, when Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and Governor Louie B. Nunn proposed an alternative plan to save the gorge by putting the dam farther downstream. The Corps, minding its politics, accepted the proposal; and the names Cooper and Nunn have become revered by the Sierra Club and all other conservationists for that move.

(Army Engineers now have plans for the big south fork of the Cumberland in Kentucky. It is one of the very best white-water canoe rivers we have left. It is a wild, unspoiled waterway running through uninhabited lands; and those who know and love it are now mustering their forces for another great contest.)

The Corps is an effective publicist. After my wife and I led the protest march against the Red River Gorge project, we flew back to Washington, D. C. that night. The next day was Sunday; and that morning, every paper I saw had a wire-service story saying that we had been driven out of Kentucky by 200 armed men who did not want "a senile judge" telling them how to run their affairs. It was not until two days later that the conservationists had their statement ready for the press.

The most alarming thing is the very number of dams proposed by the Corps. One of our wild, wild rivers is the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho---a 100-mile sanctuary that should be preserved inviolate like the Liberty Bell. White sandspits make excellent campsites. The waters so abound with trout that barbless hooks should be used. Mountain sheep look down on the river from high embankments. Deer and elk frequent the open slopes. When I ran that scenic river and returned to Washington, I discovered that the Engineers had 19 dams planned for the Middle Fork.

The most recently outraged citizens are the Yuki Indians of Round Valley, California. The Corps dam on the Eel River will flood the historic "Valley of the Tall Grass." But what difference do 300 Indians make? "Progress" must go on until we are all flooded out.

The problem with dams is that they silt in: Mud, carried to the dam by its source waters, settles in the reservoir and accumulates steadily. In time, the silt completely replaces the water. The Corps faces this prospect everywhere. Some dams in Texas lose eight percent of their capacity annually due to silting. Numerous ones lose two percent a year and at least six lose three percent or more. Most of those I examined were not Corps dams; but its Texas dams suffer the same fate. Once a dam is silted in, there is no known way to remove the silt and make the dam useful again.

The Waco Dam in Texas is a classic failure of the Engineers. Inadequate testing of the foundation shales below the embankment was the cause of the disaster. Parts of the embankment slid 700 feet from the dam axis. Correcting the failure amounted to about four percent of the original estimated cost of the dam.

The Corps has been embarrassed by hush-hush dams that are so leaky that the waters run under---not over---the dams. This failure is due to gypsum beds that underlie the reservoirs, a mineral that seems to baffle the dam builders and causes them to fall into all kinds of traps.

One conservationist, in speaking of a dam that carried water under, not over it, said rather whimsically, "This may be the perfect solution. The Corps and the Congressmen get the facility constructed, the money pours into the district, yet the river valley is saved. We should encourage gypsum bases for all Corps dams."

But the two dams where the water ran under---rather than over---have now been fixed. So the hope to make them monuments to the folly of the Engineers has vanished.

The trend is ominous. The Corps expects by 1980 to flood new areas about the size of Maryland (6,769,280 acres).

I mentioned how the Engineers planned to build a dam on the Potomac to flush the river of sewage. That is by no means the sole example. The Oakley Reservoir on the Sangamon River in Illinois has been proposed to create a huge reservoir that will wash the river of sewage from Decatur on downstream. The trouble is that a reservoir large enough will inundate Allerton Park, a unique bottom land owned by the University of Illinois where valued research in biology and ecology goes forward.

The Corps has curiously become one of our greatest polluters. It is dedicated to the task of dredging channels in rivers and in the mouth of harbors so that vessels can get in and out. These days, the bottoms of channels are not mud but sludge formed from sewage and industrial wastes. The Corps takes these dredgings and dumps them into Lake Michigan. In fact, the lake is used as a dumping ground for 64 separate dredging operations. There was a public uproar in 1967 and 1968 and hearings were held. Lake Michigan is going the way of Lake Erie, which has become a big bathtub full of stinking waste material. Lake Erie is dead; and it is feared that Lake Michigan is on its way.

The dredging of estuaries has had a similarly shocking effect. A third of San Francisco Bay---or 257 square miles---has been filled in or diked off and is now occupied by homes, shopping centers and the like. Oyster production is ended; so is clam production; only a minimal amount of shrimp production remains. There are 32 garbage-disposal sites around the shores of the Bay. Eighty sewage outfalls service the Bay. Daily, over 60 tons of oil and grease enter the estuary, the cradle of the sea. The Army Engineers are not responsible for the pollution; but they are responsible for the dredging. The National Sand and Gravel Association has the estuaries marked for billions of tons of sand and gravel for the next 30 years. The Corps issues dredging permits; and ten years of dredging, according to the experts, makes an estuary a biological desert.

But the Corps has no conservation, no ecological standards. It operates as an engineer---digging, filling, damming the waterways. And when it finishes, America the beautiful is doomed.

The ecologists say that estuaries are 20 times as productive of food as the open sea. An estuary has been called a "nutrient trap." Being shallow, it is exposed to the energy of sunlight. Rooted plants of the land and drifting plants of the sea commingle. Thick beds of grasses, sea lavender, bulrushes and cattails provide hiding areas, as well as food, for minute forms such as diatoms and for young fish, clams, mussels and oysters as well. Indeed, it is estimated that two thirds of our ocean catch has been estuary dependent for part of its life. The reality is that by the year 2000, California will not have a single running river to the ocean. What will be left, for example, of San Francisco Bay will be dead salt-water sewage.

The Corps seems destined to destroy our estuaries. The estuarine areas of our coast line have distinctive features. South of Boston are salt marshes where flounders spawn and grow to a size that permits their exit to the ocean. Down in Florida, the estuaries attract many species of commercial and sport fish and the valuable pink shrimp as well. The shrimp breed there and the young stay in the estuary until they are large enough to risk the Gulf. And so it goes from estuary to estuary. The estuaries have one thing in common---a balance between fresh water and salt water. Once the fresh water dries up and salinity increases, the estuary is avoided entirely by some species and used by the remaining species for a lesser time.

The results are revolutionary. The birds that are dependent on these sloughs for their feed must leave. The wood ibis, for example, which nests in the mangroves of Florida and feeds on the teeming estuarine life, flourishes when the annual flow of fresh water is 315,000 acre feet or more and does not nest successfully when the flow is less than that amount. Some dominant waterfowl foods---notably chara and naiad---tolerate only mild salinity. They have all but disappeared in Coot Bay in the Everglades, as a result of a Corps canal. With the elimination of those foods, the number of waterfowl in Coot Bay has declined more than nine tenths.

The Cape Fear River development is now booming along in North Carolina. In 1934, the Corps reported that flood control was not justified in the lower Cape Fear basin. In 1947, after a disastrous flood, it again reported that no dam was justified. In the 1960s, the Engineers have been saying that Cape Fear flood control is essential. They add that if flood control is not needed, a dam or a series of dams will make great recreational areas. The principal rivers feeding the main reservoir are the Haw and the New Hope, both heavily polluted. The estimated cost will be $72,000,000 plus. Residents of the valleys where 35,000 acres of choice lands will be taken are much opposed. Those are farm units, handed down from generation to generation and greatly loved. It is tragic to hear them talk about the conversion of those gorgeous acres into a gigantic cesspool for raw sewage on which enthusiastic tourists are destined, it is said, to shout with joy.

Since 1936, Federal investment in flood protection, largely through Corps activities, has amounted to more than seven billion dollars. Despite this massive investment, flood damages (according to the President's Task Force that reported in 1966) have been as much as ten times what they were in 1936. The Corps approach is purely an engineering approach. What is needed are conservation standards that regulate land use and reduce the risk that land will be so used as to accentuate runoffs and actually imperil property and lives because of man's grotesque ways of despoiling the earth. But these are no concern of the Corps. It exists to turn rivers into sluiceways and to raise the height of levees, so that man's misuse of the land may be borne by all the taxpayers. The report of the President's Task Force is a severe indictment of the Corps' mentality and techniques in dealing with water.

The disease of pouring money into a district to do something about water is a pernicious one. The Army Engineers can dredge channels, build levees and erect dams. Getting a man off heroin is easy compared with getting Congress off the kind of pork barrel the Corps administers. On July 30, 1968, Congress approved a one-and-a-quarter-billion-dollar appropriation for the civil activities of the Army Engineers. Forty-seven states were included. Texas, as might be expected, was granted 24 projects for construction during fiscal year 1969 that amounted to almost $40,000,000. Everybody is taken care of; under the cloak of flood benefits, recreation benefits and the like, great vandalism is committed. Beautiful river basins are wiped out forever and one of our most pressing problems---water pollution and sewage---goes begging.

The Everglades National Park in Florida is a unique national treasure. It lies in a shallow limestone bowl not higher than 12 feet above sea level. Its life-blood is the gentle, persistent flow of fresh water from the northern part of Florida, mostly the overflow from Lake Okeechobee. The biological and botanical life of the Everglades is intricate and amazing. The lowly gambusia fish and the alligators are the key, the gambusia feeding on mosquito larvae and starting the food chain for 150 species of fish that, in turn, nourish the alligator. The alligator wallows and forms the mudholes where this chain of aquatic life is maintained. Moreover, within the Everglades are 95 percent of all of our remaining crocodiles.

The birds come to nest and to feed on fish---white-crowned pigeons, white ibis, herons, roseate spoonbills, wood ibis, swallow-tailed kites, great white pelicans, millets, black-necked stilts, boat-tailed grackle, the anhinga, and others almost too numerous to mention. The most vulnerable of all fish is the bass that is dependent on the oxygen in the water. So when there is a drought, bass die by the hundreds. Since the garfish and the bowfin surface to get oxygen, they survive droughts somewhat better. But severe droughts kill everything; and the Corps, with no conservation standards, is the greatest killer of them all.

The park has 47 species of amphibians, all dependent on standing water for reproduction. The reptiles are dependent almost entirely on aquatic food. Of the 200 species of birds in the park, 89 are almost totally dependent on aquatic food. Five thousand pairs of wood storks, for example, require more than 1,000,000 pounds of small live fish to raise 10,000 young. Of the 12 different mammals in the park, most are amphibious or partly so. The 150 species of fish in the park are mostly dependent on estuaries for their existence. The invertebrates are also estuarine. The vegetation of the park is dominantly aquatic.

The Corps decided with the connivance of real-estate developers and prospective tomato farmers to divert all the overflow of Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic or the Gulf. It sponsored and promoted various canals, which directly or indirectly served that end. Over the years, the Corps juggled costs and benefits---it lowered construction costs though they had risen some 36 percent; it found "land enhancement" values theretofore overlooked; but, naturally, it failed to deduct the destruction of the Everglades, a unique bit of Americana, and beautiful free-flowing streams such as the Oklawaha River, which it would destroy.

Over the past ten years, the toll on the Everglades has been enormous. The park's alligator population dropped drastically between 1961 and 1966. Thousands of birds and tens of thousands of fish died. Watery expanses of saw grass became stinking mud flats where nothing could live. There were no fish even to feed the young in the rookeries. The rains in 1966 saved the Everglades; but over the years, it cannot survive on rain alone. It needs the oozing fresh water from the north.

The Corps, greatly criticized for bringing the Everglades close to complete destruction, has come up with a plan to provide the park with fresh water---a plan that has just been presented to Congress. The plan is to raise the levees around Lake Okeechobee to provide for additional water storage; it would recover some fresh water by back-pumping through canals on Florida's east coast; it would improve the canal system leading south toward the park to provide additional capacity for conveying water into the park.

But the plan, though noble on its face, utterly lacks schedules showing the guaranteed deliveries of acre feet, come the dry season or drought weather. A contest is on between fresh water for real-estate developers and farmers and the park; and the Army Engineers are strangely allied with economic interests. The concept of the public welfare that those special interests have is how well lined their pockets are with public money.

One of the worst things the Corps is doing is the methodical destruction of our riverways. Some of its plans call for a conversion of river beds into sluiceways that eliminate gravel beds for spawning of fish and islands where birds nest. In the state of Washington, the Corps is bent on destroying the last piece of the native Columbia River.

From Bonneville Dam to Grand Coulee, there are now 11 dams on the Columbia, the only natural part of the river left being a 50-mile stretch from Richland to Priest Rapids. The plans of the Corps to install Benjamin Franklin Dam will destroy that piece of the river, making all of it a big lake or reservoir.

The reason advanced is commercial. It is pointed out that with the locks of Benjamin Franklin, the apple growers of Wenatchee will be able to float their apples to the Portland market. The difficulty is that an apple traveling that distance through that hot, bleak area of eastern Washington would not be edible by the time it reached Portland.

Be that as it may, the Corps would never be building Benjamin Franklin Dam if it had any conservation standards.

This section of the river is the last natural piece of the river left. The spring and summer run of salmon enter the tributaries of the Columbia for spawning. But the fall run of the Chinook salmon spawn in the main bed; and upstream from Richland are the last spawning grounds left in the main river. Due to the disappearance of other spawning areas, this stretch of the river has become increasingly important. The 20-year average of spawning beds is 902; in 1965, there were 1770 spawning beds; in 1966, 3100; in 1967, 3267. This area now accounts for about 30 percent of all the fall Chinook production. Where they will go if the river becomes a lake, no one knows.

This stretch of the river is also an important breeding ground for small-mouthed and largemouthed bass, white sturgeon and whitefish. It is also a natural spawning ground for steelhead trout, an operation greatly aided by a state hatchery. At least 30,000 steelhead trout a year are produced here; and the summer run is so excellent that sportsmen now catch 11,000 there.

The Benjamin Franklin Dam would wipe out 20 natural islands that are breeding grounds for the Canada goose and for several species of gulls, including the California and the ring-billed. The nesting geese number about 300 adult pairs and they produce about 1000 goslings a year. The dams with their resultant impoundments have greatly reduced, in all of the upper Columbia, the goose population from 13,000 to less than half. With all the dams being completed, the upper Columbia will have fewer than 3500 geese.

The river above Richland accommodates as many as 200,000 wintering waterfowl on a single day. Most of the facilities for these wintering inhabitants will be destroyed by the Benjamin Franklin Dam.

The destruction of these spawning grounds and breeding areas is a form of official vandalism. No Federal agency with any concern for the values of conservation would be implicated in such a senseless plot.

Much of the river to be destroyed is now a part of a reservation of the Atomic Energy Commission, which uses the river to run its plutonium reactors. The AEC knows enough to realize how destructive the plans will be to the Columbia's natural wonders. But the AEC will not promote the dam nor oppose it. It is on the Corps' payroll and, like other similar Federal agencies, it is beholden.

The conservation cause is therefore handicapped. A stalwart group is fighting the dam. But public opinion is difficult to muster, as only a few people can enter the sacred precincts of the AEC reservation. So the river has few knowledgeable friends.

The Corps is now starting a vast internal canal-building project to build waterways into the dry, desert-blown parts of America. What chamber of commerce does not long to make its forgotten city a great port?

Will Rogers used to joke that the best thing to do with the Trinity River at Fort Worth, Texas, was to pave it, the stream being a bare trickle at times. That wild idea is now a reality. Construction of a 370-mile canal from Fort Worth to Houston is under way, with 20 new dams (multipurpose) and 20 locks.

Rogers used to twit the Corps about getting him "a harbor on the Verdigris at Oologah" in Oklahoma. That 1.2-billion-dollar project is now under way---a 539-mile canal reaching into the heart of Oklahoma. The plan includes 18 locks and dams that will lift river traffic 530 feet from the Mississippi to the level of Catoosa, the head of navigation.

In 1967, the Corps approved a $316,000,000 Tennessee-Tomlingbee waterway as justified by a benefit-cost ratio of 1.24 to 1. The Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, sent the report to Congress with his own contrary conclusion that the project did not have the requisite "margin of economic safety." But the interested Congressmen ignored Resor's conclusion, did not take the issue to Congress, but in committee ordered the Engineers to start the controversial canal that is to run 253 miles.

The most brazen project of all is known as Mike Kirwan's Big Ditch, linking Lake Erie with the Ohio River. Kirwan is chairman of the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on Public Works. Eighty-year-old Kirwan has long been a stern opponent of national-park development. "The U.S. owns too much land" is his position. A member of his subcommittee who opposes him is in a perpetual doghouse, never getting any favors of his own. So they all---mostly all---meekly fall into line.

Kirwan's Big Ditch would be 120 miles long, with a 35-mile reservoir to supply the canal with Erie's sewage water. Nearly 90,000 acres of the nation's finest dairy farms would be inundated and more than 6000 people would lose their homes.

The idea is an old one, going back to George Washington; but today the experts think it is utterly worthless.

The Corps benefit--cost ratio was juggled to suit its needs; obvious costs to the tune of at least $170,000,000 were left out. Benefits were rigged. Thus, "recreation" was valued at $17,000,000 a year---a sum that could be reached only if 500,000 sportsmen descended on this stinking sewage water on a normal Sunday.

The Corps approved the project, estimating the cost at over a billion dollars. It let Kirwan make the announcement. Kirwan managed it through the House; and the Senate---without a roll call---approved.

Two million of the needed one billion dollars plus for Mike Kirwan's Big Ditch was in L. B. J.'s budget, a budget in which, L. B. J. said, "Waste and non-essentials have been cut out. Reductions or postponements have been made wherever possible."

And so the skids were greased. But the voice of Pennsylvania spoke up in opposition; and the Big Ditch has been delayed. Yet the momentum is so great in Washington, that if Texas and Oklahoma can have their worthless canals, so can Ohio.

The truth is that our waterways present staggering problems demanding money, engineering skills and ecological insights. These critical problems are not being managed by the Army Engineers.

Instead, the Corps is destroying free-flowing streams to make unnecessary dams. It is trying to turn natural rivers into sluiceways; it is destroying our estuaries. Having no conservation standards, the Corps can easily destroy the Everglades in favor of get-rich real-estate promoters.

The Corps, presently headed by the efficient General William F. Cassidy, has a long and illustrious record, completely free of fraud, mismanagement or other types of scandal. By 1942, it had built two and a half billion dollars' worth of facilities in a year and a half; and during World War Two, ten billion dollars' in four years. In terms of coverage, it has included navigation, flood control, hydro-power, beach erosion, water supply, fish and wildlife preservation, hurricane protection and related subjects. Since 1824, it has built most of the nation's harbors and navigable waterways. From the beginning, it was active in flood control; and when the first national Flood Control Act was passed by Congress in 1917, it became very active, especially in the Mississippi Valley. One who tours America will see many great and useful structures built by the Corps. Certainly, the Corps is unlike the Mafia; it has no conspiratorial function. It is honest and aboveboard.

The difficulty is, however, that we are running out of free-flowing rivers and healthy estuaries. The traditional engineering functions no longer fit our needs. Our need is to preserve the few remaining natural wonders that we have and make them clean and sparkling and fit for use by humans and by the vast world of birds, fish, reptiles and crustaceans that possess our waters.

We need the Corps. But we need also to redefine its functions and change its focus.

We pay farmers not to plant crops. Let's pay the Corps not to build dams, dredge estuaries, convert rivers into sluiceways or build inland canals.

We can accomplish that goal by a few simple amendments to the Corps' basic statutory authority.

First, its projects for river improvement should now be conditioned by conservation standards. Will the project protect the marshlands? Will it provide the needed fresh water for sanctuaries such as the Everglades? Will it preserve the bottom lands sorely needed for ecological studies?

Second, the Corps' statutory authority should be enlarged to authorize it to construct sewage-disposal plants. It has no such authority. It can be busier at that than at dam building. Its large civilian staff, dependent on Federal largess for salaries, can fatten on sewage as well as on flood control and navigation.

The Corps needs statutory redesigning to meet modern urban and technological needs.

One billion dollars is needed in the Lake Erie complex to restore that dead lake, so that swimming, boating and fishing are once more possible. Mike Kirwan would not get a Big Ditch under this new regime. But he might get a big sewage-disposal plant named for him.

These are rewards enough, even at the level of pork barrel, if the Corps concentrates on socially useful projects that are desperately needed. Now is the chance to save the rest of our rivers by proclaiming our love of the land and our determination to preserve its natural wonders, even against despoilers as professionally competent as the Army Corps of Engineers.