Main Street; 2; Waters Divided

Music BLEPT BLEPT BEEF BEEF photo photo BEEF When man left his cave in the dawning of his day, there were no streets laid out to

show the pattern, the form of life. He came out unformed and groped. He searched for something, but it wasn't here. Not in these valleys of dry bones, bones desiccated, spewed once by glaciers long receded. A story is here, but he could not read it. He could only grope and seek form in rocks, which have none. Through valleys of hard rocks and sucking dryness he went, until he met a friend. This was a magic gift. It moved. It was going somewhere. There was no dry bone, hard rock, sucking dust. This was moist, alive, and moved him, with direction, purpose, and he moved with it.

This gift offered him value, achievement, and strife. Solitary in this wilderness was early man, but he was to multiply, and the man he waters would become few to his needs. Water he would see is an elusive thing. He must try to hold it, shape it, make it serve his growing numbers. But serve, his numbers would grow more, compete, fall out, and meet again to find agreement, in a vast complex of waters divided. For the National Educational Television and Radio Center, for the series Main Street. From the state of Oregon, a drama of water, a story of conflict, and compromise. This is the Columbia Main Street, Pacific Northwest, a busy thoroughfare of man.

Today, it gives him a form, a direction, as surely as it became the guide for ice age man. This river records a history of conflict. It was fought over by men who watered cattle, and by both men who carried freight. It is contended for now by men of industry and government, and by those who love the wilderness. With its traffic and its dams, the Columbia unites the peoples of seven states and two nations. The coming of the white man brought great changes, until almost forgotten, is the river of Indian memory. The Columbia's beginning, from mountain ice, a trickle brought by gravity and other trickles to downstream greatness, a noble beginning, cold against the contention that must come, when one has much to give.

A lonely river here, ignored by those who get along very well, without the flow of life, content in day-to-day aridity, going nowhere, needing no bloom, but mystery, in expanse. The Columbia cuts a figure in the rock, and plunges to a soil that knows the ways of water, and throws up monuments to it. And so, to another expanse, the sea, the end with no ending for a river. All these, the Indian knew. He shared these waters with no one but the fish, and many times a day would he dispossess the salmon of their water rights, the right of cycle, the right to challenge the swift current, in the following of their anadrimous destiny. But the Indian, might he too someday be dispossessed? He had always been here, shaping fine nets. He had learned to thrust at a fish, at the time of its unweariness, and to return the catch

to the village. This had always been, but now, those who did not belong were to come, and defile. The white man guaranteed the Indian rights to fish here in a treaty. But now, these falls are gone. Buried under the reservoir raised by the white man's dam, the treaty was a piece of paper in the path of progress, important to the Indian, but not important when weighed against the opportunities for creating power for industry and navigation for the transport of goods. He was compensated with many thousands of the white man's dollars. But what is compensation? Does it buy the art of making the net, the challenge of a salmon's movement? Does it take creals of the river's meat to the village, as they have been taken through all the moons of time? The falls are gone.

The village, under the flood of man's search for opportunity and profit, some of the profit held out to him for dropping the net and dropping out of the ways of his fathers. The Indian could not be left alone to enjoy the fruits of this land. They came with the wheel and they filled the valleys with their farms. For their crops, there was water, in the clouds, driven into the valleys from the sea. Sometimes there was too much water. It's such a dark night, do you think it came up to the barn? I don't know, you saw the river today, a hearted rain. We worked so hard, I just think we might lose everything. We can gun our blessings if we got any left to count.

Don't talk that way now. God won't let us suffer, He gave us hands to build a farm, He can do it again if we have to. Yeah, God showed us a way here, then we came, He's showing us something else now and we've got to come to that too. In the enlightened days of power dams and flood control planning, there are still floods. The unpredictable savagery of waters freed by the action of warm winds and rain on deep mountain snow, it brought ruin to man crops, soil and a city, Van Port Oregon in May of 1948. Forty died when dikes crumbled and sixty thousand were looking for new homes. Thousands crowded into temporary shelters, lost and bewildered, unable to comprehend the aftermath, not given to thinking of man's pattern squares disjointed into angles and jumbled lions.

How can a city block be lost? The builders of dams asked questions too. How many levees? How many reservoirs upstream to catch the extra waters? If the waters were to be stored in shallow lakes, a foot deep, it would take 32 million acres of storage space, half the area of the state of Oregon to tame the worst of the floods. Farm storage is already a fact on one of the Columbia's side streets, the Willamette. Farm ponds catch some of the waters running off the mountain slopes. To release them later as the water seeps slowly into the mountain streams, the delaying action by the ponds means that not all of the water runoff will hit the big dams downstream. All water works and ponds work with the dams in this way to regulate water flows. Surplus waters today work for the farmer.

Here is located the Colossus in the desert that brought Colombian man victory over ungiving land. Grand Cooley, a power and irrigation dam in eastern Washington built by the Bureau of Reclamation. Cooley and engineering threw up the walls and ducts of this desert image, a sphinx with a new riddle, what power does the running of a million legs? Grand Cooley catches the flooding waters of spring and early summer, waters that would otherwise rush by and gather to threaten another van port downstream. Cooley collects them, pumps them uphill into a reservoir for man's needs, stored waters to bring about the flowering of the desert. Grand man to build cities where only rattlesnakes and jack rabbits could congregate before. Stored waters support the farmer and the businessman, for where new irrigated lands are opened, whole cities come into being. Storage for winter's great demand for power when waters are running low, and the great

fall for power is not there. It took a giant of a reservoir for this, and nature helped long ago. Only the ice age man remembered the Cooley that meant its name to the dam. Ice once blocked the natural passage of the Columbia, forced it to make a detour and gouge out a new channel. When the last great glacier melted, the ice dam melted away too, and the Columbia turned again to its natural course. But it left a deep trench where the spring and summer high water can be stored. New pioneers are settling the new irrigated lands and building new industries. Irrigation and power invite development of this large inland area. But after goods are produced, they must be carried to market. One stream, another plan, a master water plan, offers a route to the sea for large barges.

The core of engineers of the U.S. Army began its series of navigation, power, and flood control dams in 1935 here at Bonneville. Other dams, now completed or underway, will build up enough deep water to carry barges of 15 foot draft, more than 300 miles inland, to the heart of the agricultural country and to important mining centers. Gasoline and chemicals needed for industry and farming can be carried at low cost to these inland points. Downstream will come the produce, now mostly wheat and wood products. If the dam is built by the core to serve navigation, and such dams as Grand Cooley to give irrigation, goes power. The Columbia, most powerful of North America's waters, sends cascading into homes and industries 40% of the hydroelectric power in the United States.

Rising statistics as impressive as the falling waters show man pressing his advantage. The Pacific Northwest, in 10 years, will ask the Columbia for twice the power it is getting now. In a quarter century, it will ask everything the river has to give. And after that, the steel and fertilizer and plywood industries and the homes will have to find more power in coal and the atom. The core of engineers master plan aims to get the greatest possible use out of the Columbia. The plan calls for multi-purpose dams to serve the needs of power, flood control, irrigation and navigation. But government agencies do not have the river to themselves. Private power companies consider development of the Columbia's power potential as a fair pursuit for private enterprise.

In the deep reaches of the Snake River, the Columbia's longest tributary, private and public agencies fought and are fighting, a battle of economic philosophies. Private power leaders fear that if the government takes over development of the entire Columbia, a normal exercise of free enterprise will be stifled. They say, let the profit opportunities determine the power sites where money is to be invested. They contend that no industry has served the nation better than private power, and they claim the majority of citizens think both the federal government and private power should develop the river basin. Private power won the right to build three low dams here in Hell's Canyon on the Snake. The government through the core of engineers wanted to build a high dam in the same reach of the river. The public power argument is that private power will build at places most favorable to them, rather than at sites which will best serve all the water needs of the basin.

Private power denies this. These fish ladders are symbols of another conflict, fish versus dams. For the Columbia Salmon, the ladder of success is a nightmare of repetition. He doesn't get the reports on new dams. He can't know when one will be completed, but next year, or next, he will find another ladder, another delay, and he will feel its challenge. This year, or next, the number of delays may be too many. The fish may give up and die, and with him would die generations unborn. The end of the salmon cycle would end the matter of profit for the sellers of fishing gear and the canners of salmon. In some places, trucks pack the fish around the dam and plant them in the fresh running current, a break in their long fight to reach home waters. How soon can a salmon take the next dam, and will his rate of climb slow down as the

dams multiply his obstacles? It's hard enough going upstream, but for the generation he is about to spawn, there are more troubles. The still waters of the reservoirs created by the dams are natural breeding places for trash fish, which prey on the ocean-bound fingerlings or salmon babies. Here again, trucks may be the answer in getting the fingerlings past their natural, stillwater enemies. Perhaps a more serious obstacle is stream pollution by municipal and industrial waste. A real salmon stopper, the pollution of the Willamette River, in its lower stretches, has impeded seriously the passage of salmon as well as steelhead. Industrial processing and manufacturing put more discharges into the stream, adding further to the pollution. Sewage and industrial wastes sometimes interfere with other recreational uses of the river, to, to the commercial and sports fishermen, the fish naturally is most important.

These men are taking samples of Columbia River water, to test them for presence of radio active materials, another type of waste, released into the river, in minute quantities, by the Hanford Atomic Plant of Eastern Washington. The atomic operation was located here because a plantable supply of electric power is available, and the area is sparsely settled, or rather was, when Hanford began as a secret atomic project in 1943. Since then, thousands have moved in. The operation has brought cities into being, replacing villages and sagebrush. Another important reason for the location is the heat generated by nuclear reactors. Cooling these reactors calls for water in a volume the Columbia can supply. Hundreds of thousands of gallons per minute. In the cooling operation, impurities in the water become radioactive, and are in the used

water when it re-enters the Columbia. The people of nearby cities will drink the water though because they know the radioactive materials are present in such small amounts as to be harmless, for drinking. But radio biologists have found that when tiny plants in the river absorb the particles, the radioactive materials become concentrated, and when the plants in turn are eaten by small fish, there is further concentration in what the biologists call a food chain. Bigger fish and birds eat the small fish, and there is still greater concentration. Present studies will try to define the highest doses of radioactive materials that can be administered safely to plants, animals, and humans who eat the fish, and concentrate the radioactivity further still. Radio biologists have not found all there is to know about effects at the top of the food chain, but they have found that so far the natural radioactivity that exists in

men is present in larger quantities than the extra particles taken in from the fish, and fishing does go on today in the Columbia. So we've made the fish look pretty important, actually does he count for much? In some tabulations the fish are down the list, well behind agriculture, the timber industry, and the growing tourist trade, but to destroy the runs his coming home to spawn with dams to break a life cycle with these is abhorrent to many. The salmon, the wildlife, and the scenic greatness of the Columbia Empire have become symbols of a cause. This man is one of the crusaders of that cause. He is not against dams or the right of men to profit from them. Oh he used to talk that way, used to say, no more dams, they'll ruin the fission, and no more industries, they bring too many people in.

Why it's getting now so as a man can hardly find a place to go to get away from civilization. Because this pessimism there is the fact of great areas of wilderness still untouched by man. And while there are more people, there are also more fish. And for this we can thank in part the sports fisherman whose opinions carry weight in the Pacific Northwest. State and federal fish game and wildlife groups have answered the fisherman's fears with improved hatchery programs and good management of fisheries. Some of that feeling about dams and industries remains. He doesn't speak out against them now. He also feels he should be progressive, should want to help the Columbia Basin grow. Like the waters he is divided by his two prides, the wilderness, and the opportunities it offers for development. The sportsman who is a member of a wildlife society would call this a habitat marsh. The farmer might look at it as water to be drained for irrigation.

Grainage destroys the habitat marsh, the farmer's coughs. Habitat marsh, what's your habitat marsh, you're a few duck dinners against my dollars and cinch crop. The protector of wildlife is at one with the sports fisherman. He wants to see the wilderness remain, stand in fastnesses against the pressing of man's need, his multiplying numbers, his claim against the resource. What the farmers claim on the waters hardly can be dismissed lightly. Agriculture is the number one means of livelihood in the Columbia River Basin. From the dry farming of Columbia's eastern half, where the rains give only six inches a year, to the western valleys where rainfall is a moderate 40 inches, to the pastures of the coast, where the yearly deluge goes over 100 inches. And on the rainy western slopes flourishes the number two source of livelihood, the forest. Columbia's blanket above the soil intercepts the rain from clouds sweeping in from the sea. Allows the water to filter into the soil, slowly to move by underground channels to the

streams and rivers. Lumber, plywood, paper, an economic giant the forest industry of the northwest must have a continuous supply of raw material. But when he cuts timber on a billion dollar scale, man faces an enigma of water problems. Protective cover, gone, the bare soil forming funnels for waters no longer held by tree roots. They pile up silt and debris in streams, irrigation ditches and reservoirs. This happens when man mismanages the forest. The wind-driven destruction of the forest, it has cost the Columbia much permanent damage in the value of timber and in the porosity that makes a watershed hold water. Being burned over and logged over lands back into production, the northwest has learned the ways of management. The forestry looks ahead now, a century ahead, to the time when these trees will mature. He is developing the forest to fit a new concept of water management, multiple use, use

by the many interests. The shipper, the farmer, the industrialist, the fisherman, for the tourist. State and federal agencies have joined an cooperative effort, the Columbia Basin Interagency Committee, where they are trying now to resolve their single goals into one master plan. But there are other interests that must come together, the interests of states and nations, whose boundaries cross the natural boundary of the basin. A look at this map shows how easily the Columbia brings state into conflict with state, state with nation and nation with nation. Oregon's Dechutes River was the scene of a legal fight between state and nation. State agencies opposed grating of an application by a power company to build a dam on the

Dechutes, the Federal Power Commission granted the license anyway. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the federal agency on these grounds, that the dam was located on lands reserved to the federal government. This decision threatens historic interpretation of water rights, which always had assumed, that the state controlled all waters within its boundaries. Here its nation versus nation, and Canada appears in the role of puppeteer with the Columbia and the Cootany Rivers as strings. At one time, Canada considered this manipulation of the rivers. At one point where the two streams are only a mile apart, Canada would have diverted the Cootany into the Columbia. This of course would lower the river level in the Montana and Idaho reaches. This idea is no longer being considered.

The United States wants Canada to build dams for storing power upstream, for use in the U.S. downstream during slack periods, and for more even river flow, as a protection against floods. The International Joint Commission, including three Americans and three Canadians, is working out solutions to the problems of both nations in developing the Columbia. Here's the further complication in the overlapping of state and federal agencies. The Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, principal builders of dams, head the federal list. Both are concerned with some of the same things, flood control, fish and wildlife, power, navigation, and irrigation. The Public Health Service shares with the Bureau the problem of water pollution abatement, the U.S. Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service are concerned with wildlife. The Forest Service shares with the Bureau of Land Management the problems of range management.

Other important federal agencies are the Soil Conservation Service, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Bonneville Power Administration, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Weather Bureau. These are the federal agencies. Other states have their own agencies, all are concerned with the future of the Columbia. How it can serve the growing demands on the river system. A growing that began, when covered wagons, brought the first settlers into the heart of the Columbia Empire. It was, in itself, content to be a river, to find its way as resistance required, along the sloping path to the sea.

To moisten, only with a passing lick, and leave the dry waste to its dryness. But to man, it was a street, laid out to show a pattern, main street, Pacific Northwest. Today, man works beyond his borders, and with his conflicts, to bring the river toward its ultimate ability to serve him. Water is divided, a story of conflict and agreement, was a presentation of Oregon's state-owned

educational television station, K-O-A-C-T-V, in Corvallis. This is N-E-T, National Educational Television.