FEEDING GROWTH 20 YEARS AGO CAP CANAL FIRST WATERED VALLEY EPIC PROJECT YIELDS MODERN-DAY SPRAWL
by Jon Talton, The Arizona Republic
December 18, 2005

Twenty years ago, Colorado River water first flowed through a 190-mile aqueduct from Lake Havasu to farmers in the Harquahala Valley. It wouldn't arrive in Phoenix for another year, and the complex system of canals, pumps, tunnels, dams and siphons would not reach Tucson until 1992. But it was real. It was here.

The Central Arizona Project had finally come.
When it was complete, the CAP would draw millions of gallons from the river at Lake Havasu, then vault it up and through the rugged Buckskin Mountains and onto a 336-mile journey to the cities of the Arizona interior.
The $3.6 billion CAP is the mightiest of mighty acts that allowed a modern urban civilization to exist in a hostile desert, an audacious denial of the limits of the West, the last great reclamation project.
It was the creation of three generations of engineers, lawyers and politicians who made it their life's work. Today, our economy, our society, the shape of our cities and even our simplest assumptions are all built upon the CAP. We live in a world it made.
"It's far more profoundly influential in what we have created than people think," said Jack August Jr., director of the Arizona Historical Foundation and a leading historian of the CAP. "Most people just see a canal. But our sense of self was shaped by the years of effort (of the CAP's visionaries and builders)."
What if the CAP had never been built? "We would have a far smaller population," August said, one heavily confined to the Salt River Project area. "Psychologically, people here would be living within certain environmental limits."
That was never going to happen, or so it appears today. In fact, the Central Arizona Project nearly failed many times.
Notice that the Salt River Valley was inundated with flooding rains early this year, yet the drought soon reasserted itself. Such maddening cycles informed the worldview of pioneers here at the turn of the 20th century. Armed with the first reclamation project of the Newlands Act, they would tame the river and make it water human dreams.
But it was not enough for the reclamation dreams of other vast desert tracts, and in these visions the CAP was born. Growth depended on water, and so too did the Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers, translated to a reclaimed desert.
California also was taking water out of the Colorado River, a resource Arizonans believed belonged to them.
Soon after World War I, Arizonans began plotting, working, legislating and litigating to get 2.8 million acre-feet of the mighty river. It was the issue that took the most of Sen. Carl Hayden's 57 years in the U.S. House and Senate.
The quest for the CAP defined many of Arizona's giants, including Hayden, Sen. and Gov. Ernest McFarland, Gov. and Sen. Paul Fannin, Rep. John Rhodes, and Mark Wilmer, the lawyer who won the state's epic water case against California.
But the notion of a CAP consensus is faulty memory. Arizonans warred among themselves over the project even as they took on mighty California. Even after the Supreme Court victory in 1963, and President Lyndon Johnson's authorization of the project in 1968, Arizona faced years of hurdles.
In 1977, President Carter tried to cancel the CAP, prompting Sen. Barry Goldwater to rage, "It has to be built. And if it's not, this Valley is going out of business." Carter backed down.
August attended a celebration at the new CAP headquarters in 1985. He remembers it as "very emotional" as the people who had spent their lives working for the project gathered. Wilmer was "the guy at the party," a man who had changed the history of the American West, said August, who is working on the first full biography of the lawyer.
Concrete desert
The creation of the CAP is all around us. Greater Phoenix held about half a million people when Arizona vs. California was decided. Today, the population is 3.5 million and growing, in a concrete desert 100 miles across.
The CAP was the child of farming and mining interests. But, in the end, its renewable water supplies created a urban-suburban oasis civilization. Contrary to the myth of wide-open spaces, Arizona has one of the most urbanized populations in the nation.
The CAP allowed for recharge of groundwater, which, at least for now, encourages sprawl far out into the desert.
The project also required settlement of American Indian water rights, which gives some tribes vast, and evolving, new power.
Attitudes are no less important. "We think there's going to be water," August said. "It's like having a rich grandfather, and we don't have to work."
The frenetic growth is largely fueled by the illusion of abundance from the CAP. Yet CAP supplies are fully committed, and the Colorado, which has been destroyed as a wild river, is oversubscribed. (This lack of river supply was one of California's arguments in opposing Arizona.)
As one water expert put it: "What we really need to do is change our thinking and start seeing the CAP as the last bucket in our state's water supply and stop looking for the next bucket."
For better or for worse
My mother was one of the CAP soldiers, working for a decade for the Arizona Interstate Stream Commission, and sometimes directly for Wilmer. The day Johnson signed the CAP legislation, she loaded me and my grandmother in the car.
We made the short drive from central Phoenix until we were enveloped in the cool citrus groves, then we visited the Japanese gardens, passed the vast fields surrounding this small-town city and finally touched the virgin Sonoran Desert. "I want you to remember it," she said, "because now it's gone."
She was an ardent CAP supporter and never met a dam she didn't like. But even then, in the flush of victory, she knew the Central Arizona Project would be both a blessing and a curse.
CAP timeline
* 1919: Colorado River basin states organize the League of the Southwest to promote river development.
* 1921: Congress authorizes the states to enter a Colorado River Compact.
* 1922: Colorado River Compact submitted to Congress for approval.
* 1928: Congress authorizes Boulder Canyon Project, allotting 4.4 million acre-feet of water annually to California, 2.8 million to Arizona, and 300,000 to Nevada.
* 1944: United States and Mexico sign treaty allotting 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually. Arizona Legislature ratifies the compact.
* 1946: Central Arizona Project Association is organized.
* 1947: Sen. Ernest McFarland introduces S. 1175 to authorize the CAP. California blocks the bill.
* 1957: Arizona shifts its legal strategy against California under lawyer Mark Wilmer.
* 1963: Supreme Court hands down opinion in Arizona vs. California, allotting 2.8 million acre-feet of mainstream Colorado River water to Arizona annually, clearing the way for action on the CAP by Congress.
* 1967: Sens. Carl Hayden and Paul Fannin introduce a new bill, S. 1004, to authorize the CAP.
* 1968: President Lyndon Johnson signs S. 1004, the Colorado River Basin Project, authorizing the CAP.
* 1971: Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties create the Central Arizona Water Conservation District to repay the federal government and contract to sell water.
* 1973: Appropriated construction funds are made available and the first construction contract is awarded. Groundbreaking ceremonies are held on the shores of Lake Havasu.
* 1980: Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus announces the final Indian allocations.
* 1982: The final environmental impact statement for water allocations and water delivery contracts is filed with EPA.
* 1985: The first Colorado River water is pumped from Lake Havasu and delivered to the Harquahala Valley Irrigation District.
* 1990: Water delivery requests exceed CAP's daily capacity of 3,000 cubic feet per second.
* 1992: A topping-out ceremony is held for New Waddell Dam. Tucson celebrates arrival of CAP water.
* 1996: The CAP celebrates record deliveries of more than 1 million acre feet of water.
Reach Talton at jon.talton@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8464.
CAPTION: The canal northwest of Phoenix is a ribbon across the desert. CAPTION: This is an aerial view of the Red Rock Pumping Plant, between Phoenix and Tucson in Red Rock.