Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

finished, the Placer County Water Agency could have released stored snowmelt from their Middle Fork dams into the Auburn Reservoir and withdrawn it again through this tunnel, by gravity, to supply the western edge of the county with its water.

Three decades later, the mouth of the Auburn Ravine Tunnel—which by then should have been four hundred feet beneath the Auburn Reservoir—was still high and dry on the canyon wall in the dam site, two hundred feet above the river. Meanwhile Placer County's population had tripled, much of that along the county's western edge. To fulfill its obligations under a contract made with the county's water agency back when Auburn Dam was a certainty, the Bureau had been installing a temporary pump station and pipeline from the American River up the canyon wall to the mouth of the Auburn Ravine Tunnel every summer. Every fall the agency would disassemble the whole affair and move it to high ground, because the pumps had to be located where the river entered the diversion tunnel around the dam's foundations, and the shape of the canyon there made the pumps and pipeline vulnerable to being swept away by high water in the winter. This was costing the federal government between a quarter million and, on at least one occasion, one million dollars a year.

Over time this situation made strange bedfellows. Even with the temporary pumps, Placer County was getting less than a third of its annual rights to American River water at the dam site. For its part, the Bureau wanted an end to the Sisyphean task of constructing and disassembling the pump station and pipeline. Until such a time as the Auburn Dam's political fortunes got better, the way out for the Bureau was to close the diversion tunnel, restore the river to its course through the dam site, and install a permanent pump station in what was now the dry part of the riverbed, where the canyon's shape would put the pumps out of reach of high water. And environmental groups had long seen restoration of the river through the dam site as the victory they wanted over the Bureau and its dam.

In 1995 the Bureau quietly began working on plans to do what everyone wanted. But by 1998 the project ran afoul of Congressman John Doolittle, now chair of the Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources and a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Doolittle saw the restoration of the river through the dam site the same way the conservationists did—as a symbolic end to the Auburn Dam—and he didn't want any part of it. In his position of power over the Bureau's budget he demanded that the Bureau redesign the project to put the pumps somewhere upstream, leaving the diversion tunnel and other completed work on the Auburn Dam intact. However, if the Bureau did this, the project would lose the support of environmentalists.

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A book such as this can contain only the highlights of such a long and convoluted story as the Auburn Dam's, in which two generations of conservationists fought two generations of developers, politicians, and dam engineers, and enough studies and reports were published to fill a medium-sized library. But to sketch that story's resolution, I must mention just a few of the environmentalists who had a part in saving the American River, and to do so should not be seen as diminishing the contributions of others.

Gary Estes is a slight, quiet, conservative-looking man who favors slacks and button-down sport shirts in muted designs. He has a degree in political science and the remnants of a soft Virginia accent. His professorial appearance and speech belie his blue-collar origins. His father was a ship fitter at the Norfolk Island Naval Shipyard.

Estes's résumé is a strange one. He is probably one of those people with a very high IQ who can easily become bored with the mundane quality of everyday work in most fields. By the time his restless intelligence found the Auburn Dam, he had already been a schoolteacher, a self-taught engineer specializing in heating and cooling of office buildings, the administrator of an energy users' group, an activist in energy issues, and a paralegal. In 1989 Estes and his wife moved to Auburn and Estes became his own general contractor, constructing a house for himself and his wife on the rim of the North Fork canyon near the dam site. By the time he finished the house he'd become interested in the dam. His wife had become used to being the breadwinner while Estes was building, and she now offered to support them while Estes devoted himself to his wide-ranging avocations. Estes is the first to admit that makes him a lucky guy.

In his new time off, Estes decided to teach himself geology and seismology in order to review a mountain of technical literature on earthquake hazards at the Auburn Dam site. He then prepared a treatise on the subject to accompany a presentation to the Auburn City Council. In his presentation, Estes pointed out that constructing the Auburn Dam to prevent Sacramento floods merely shifted disaster risk from the people of Sacramento to the people of Auburn, who lived next to the faults along which the Auburn Dam's filling might trigger a devastating earthquake. However speculative, it was an interesting point.

During the same period Estes was reading advanced meteorology, climatology, and river hydrology in order to study the kind of storms that caused floods on the American River. Estes thought it might be possible to recognize these storms as they formed over the Pacific (as Bill Mork and his colleagues had in 1986) and then convince the Bureau and the Army Corps of Engineers to act on those predictions (which did not occur in 1986) by dumping water from Folsom Dam to accommodate the predicted inflow. This, he reasoned, might eliminate the need for an Auburn Dam—at least where the dam's flood control aspects were concerned. In 1994 Estes coauthored a scholarly paper on the subject with