Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

broken, and in the dark the tunnels echoed with drips of water. The water trickled along their floors, emerging at the tunnel mouths high on the keyways, where willows, their seeds carried there on the wind or by birds, were taking root and would soon grow to hide the tunnel portals entirely.

In the Bureau's palatial offices on the canyon rim, janitors still kept the floors perfectly polished, and each morning the engineers showed up for work as usual. Within another few years one dropped dead at his post from a heart attack, still waiting to finish his dam. NO TRESPASSING signs were posted on all the locked gates into the dam site, and the gates were checked every day or two by the rangers. But they would never have known if someone had let himself in with a key. And it seemed that everyone in some semiofficial capacity—game wardens, utility linemen, volunteer firemen, even sheriff's deputies—had one. But that's just one of many possibilities.

The quiet in the dam site had come about in the context of two major shifts in public attitudes during the 1960s and 1970s. The first was the advent of widespread public concern for the well-being of the natural world, the second a growing disenchantment with government.

Nineteen sixty-two, the year the Bureau of Reclamation distributed its prospectus on the Auburn Dam to Congress, also saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a book whose wide readership is often cited as the beginning of a broad-based environmental movement in the United States. That movement can be said to have come of age with the 1969 passage of the National Environmental Policy Act. Under the new law, the Bureau was required to publish an accounting of the environmental effects of its dams. Within a month of the 1972 release of the final environmental impact statement for the Auburn Dam, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit against the Bureau. A federal judge subsequently found the Bureau's statement inadequate and ordered the agency to amend it. By the time the Bureau presented the amendment to the public in August 1973, it was not the same public at all that had approved of the Bureau and its dams back when the project began.

By April 1973 America's leaders had succeeded in sacrificing the lives of fifty-eight thousand young men to a war they'd just lost in Vietnam. In May the Senate established a committee to investigate President Richard Nixon's rigging of his own reelection, a string of executive office misdeeds known collectively as Watergate. As Watergate unraveled, the Bureau was trying to make its case to the public that drowning the American River canyons was necessary and right, and after a decade of war and domestic turmoil, the federal government's credibility was in sorry shape.

By the end of that decade Americans' prevailing mood toward government was reflected in a reassessment of government's right to tax and spend their money. Big federal dams had originated under the free-spending New Deal in the 1930s, and although the Bureau always made a show of economically justifying its projects, the dams often failed to live up to those justifications. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was sent to the White House promising to cut government and government spending. By the early eighties the price of finishing the Auburn Dam had swelled to an estimated $2.1 billion—too much, thought the Reagan administration and many members of Congress, for something so controversial. Still, the dam might have been a fait accompli by then if not for the Oroville earthquake of 1975.

Oroville was a Gold Rush—era town about forty-five miles north of Auburn, near a strand of the Foothill Fault Zone called the Cleveland Hill Fault. In 1967, the state of California finished building a dam on the Feather River there. It was the tallest dam in the nation when it was completed, a monster pile of rock fill 770 feet high and well over a mile wide, designed to send water through a system of canals and pumps all the way to greater Los Angeles. The Oroville Reservoir took years to fill, and when it did, its 3.5 million acre-feet of water pressed down on the earth with a weight of about 4.72 billion tons.

Unlike most cases of what was now being called "reservoir-induced seismicity," the Oroville event came not during the reservoir's filling but during a rapid drawdown in the dry summer of 1975. On the afternoon of Friday, August 1, a series of violent shocks rocked the area, radiating from an epicenter on the Cleveland Hill Fault just southwest of the dam. The largest reached a magnitude of 5.7. In Oroville, sidewalks and streets buckled and cans and bottles rumbled off store shelves, forming heaps in the aisles. People ran out of homes and businesses into the middle of streets, where some stood thunderstruck, frozen in fear. Others fell to their knees and began to pray, sure that the day of reckoning had come. Schools and county offices were damaged and had to be closed. At a local fire station, firemen watched spellbound as a tank truck full of water jumped up and down on the concrete floor of one of the truck bays. Then the dispatch speaker began to crackle with multiple calls. One man had suffered a heart attack as the ground shook underneath him. Another man had been driving down the main street of town when he looked over his shoulder to watch the buildings wobbling around crazily and collided with a parked car. Falling power lines ignited multiple grass fires. Chimneys fell, or teetered and had to be pulled down.

By September geologists from the U.S. government and the state of California swarmed into the foothills, and as the similarity of Oroville's and Auburn's locations on the Foothill Faults became clear, work on the Auburn Dam was suspended until further geological studies could be completed. Seven months later, the Association of Engineering Geologists' Seismic