The Creepiest Zombie the U.S. has Ever “Planned”
As Halloween approaches, one’s thoughts naturally return to movies with a disturbing supernatural theme — perhaps Night of the Living Dead and its zombie apocalypse spawn.
Here at Friends of the River, of course, we have struggled with the animated corpses of dead dams walking. Among them are the distinctly creepy proposed Auburn and Temperance Flat dams and the Shasta Dam raise, and though we have knocked them down, it is not clear that they will not rise again. It is, after all, what zombies do.
Editor’s note: NAWAPA sought to siphon rivers from Canada and Alaska to quench the thirst of the American West. Though it was defeated ages ago, NAWAPA lurks in the shadows, a reminder of the dangers of reviving reckless water schemes that threaten to drain ecosystems and spark international strife. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Recently, a prominent U.S. politician apparently expressed his strong belief in his ability to reanimate the creepiest zombie the U.S. west has ever “planned”: the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), when he stated "You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It's massive, it's as big as the wall of that building … and you turn that and all of that water goes … aimlessly into the Pacific and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles."
Yes, this presidential candidate seemed to be channeling the long-interred wraith of the NAWAPA from the middle years of the last century(1).
The Wikipedia article on NAWAPA(1) noted the following about this project:
Environmental writer Marc Reisner noted in Cadillac Desert that the plan was one of "brutal magnificence" and "unprecedented destructiveness." Historian Ted Steinberg suggested that NAWAPA summed up "the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West" and credited rising costs and the rise of the environmental movement with killing the idea. One author called it "the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years".
Luna Leopold, a conservationist and professor of hydrology at the University of California, Berkeley, said of NAWAPA, "The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can't even be described. It would cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years."
But that’s just the opinion of “experts.”
Fortunately, I guess, at least in the genius-level mind of this U.S. politician, NAWAPA has already been built! If only the rest of us could see it! The mighty Columbia River(2) is already free for the taking and need not “waste” its waters to the sea. All that is needed would be a politician willing to turn on an unused giant faucet to free the waters of the snowclad Canadian Rocky Mountains to reach their manifest destiny to slake the thirst of the western U.S. With the faucet open, California would have all the water it ever needed to irrigate its farms, cities, deserts, and mountains.
Predictably, there were pointy-headed academic critics claiming that the faucet and the giant dams, canals, siphons, and pump stations do not even exist. Canadian(3) and Pacific Northwest(4) “experts” were particularly insistent.
But who you gonna believe, some “expert,” who probably doesn’t even believe in Halloween spooks and zombies, or a “stable genius” who just knows things that lesser mortals cannot?
