Even then, aside from an occasional flurry of gold mining, the Columbia Basin was left largely to a few isolated ranchers.
The first of the dam’s primary generators went on line in October 1941. No other public works project has had a greater impact on the development of the Pacific Northwest. Grand Coulee impounds a reservoir, Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, named for the president who authorized construction of the dam, which began in 1933 (see construction photos). From there, the water would be siphoned into a labyrinth of tunnels and canals. This was a blow to the ditchers. Senators Wesley Jones and Clarence Dill of Washington persuaded President Hoover in 1929 to support a $600,000 study of Columbia River hydropower potential by the Corps of Engineers. These developments added to the political pressure for a reclamation project in the Columbia Basin. The two original power plants, the first of which began producing power in 1941, are called the Left Power Plant and the Right Power Plant, following the standard naming protocol of facing downriver. The power generated by a high dam, eight times more than the low dam, would be used, he believed.
Columbia River Basin in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, As gargantuan as it is, Grand Coulee is only part of the massive Columbia Basin Project, which includes four other dams, three storage lakes, and 2,300 miles of irrigation canals, snaking through half a million acres of desert. Meanwhile, the John W. Keys III pumping plant also is being modernized. All six generators at the Third Power Plant are being refurbished and their worn components are being replaced. The canyon’s granite walls offered a nearly watertight container for a deep reservoir. The dam blocked the access of wild ocean-going salmon and steelhead to hundreds of miles of spawning grounds on the upper Columbia River. Also see this video on Grand Coulee's construction. For a new generation of environmentalists, the debate is no longer about who should build the dams, but whether some of the old ones should be torn down. This brand of progress did not come without a price. In June 1935, then-Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes signed the first change order, directing the contractors to build a base for a dam that would top off at 550 feet. It is 5,223 feet (1,592 meters) long, or 57 feet short of a mile. The first meaningful steps toward federal involvement came in 1926, when Congress appropriated $600,000 for a comprehensive study of irrigation, flood control, power, and navigation on the Columbia above its confluence with the Snake River. "To build it required only three things: promoters with vision, the right technology, and a great deal of money" (Pitzer, 6). 1935, Photo by Frank Wilma, Courtesy David Wilma, Construction cranes on Grand Coulee Dam, 1930s, Generators, Grand Coulee Dam interior, ca. "One day we were fishermen, the next day there were no fish," commented Michael Marchand, a member of the council of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Oregonian, 2000). They expected these farms to support 80,000 people, nearly all of them relocated from the "Dust Bowl" in the Midwest. His 1933 budget allocated $63 million for a 290-foot tall dam. Among those who lamented the defeat of the bond issue was William "Billy" Clapp (1877-1965), a lawyer in the small town of Ephrata. It provided the power that helped the nation win a war. Whatever its impacts, good or ill, "the likelihood that Grand Coulee Dam will ever be removed is practically nil," the report concluded. Woods initially regarded the idea as far-fetched, even hare-brained.
One of the contractors’ first tasks was to build a town to house workers and their families. Bureau of Reclamation publicists and patriotic news reporters, among others, hailed Grand Coulee Dam as almost single-handedly winning World War II for the allies. Washington Governor Clarence Martin drove a symbolic engineering stake into the ground. (208) 378-6214 In contrast, the "pumping plan" -- proposed by Clapp and championed by Woods -- called for the construction of a 550-foot-tall dam on the Columbia. There was little white settlement until the 1880s, when transcontinental railroads reached the area. The John W. Keys Pump-Generator Plant, which is located on the left bank of the river just upstream from the dam, contains 12 pumps that lift water up the hillside to a canal that flows into Banks Lake, the 27-mile-long reservoir for the Columbia Basin Project. Results of the Nov. 3 general election show that Okanogan County voters liked the levy more than voters in Grant, Douglas, and Lincoln counties, and liked it … Bureau of Reclamation . More than 250 dams barricaded the river and its tributaries, with 11 behemoths on the main stem in Washington state alone. As it cures, concrete generates heat. Leonard Ortolano and Katherine Cushing, Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project, USA, November 2000, case study report prepared for the World Commission on Dams, Cape Town, South Africa, World Commission on Dams website accessed on February 24, 2005 (http://www.dams.org/kbase/studies/us); Woody Guthrie, "Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee," reprinted in Roll on Columbia: The Columbia River Songs ed. Then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt had invited the commission to include Grand Coulee in a study of 10 large hydroelectric and reclamation projects around the world. The Grand Coulee Dam School District's Supplemental Educational Programs and Operation passed with 51% of the vote last Tuesday. About 400 isolated farms and 10 small communities -- with a total population of between 3,000 and 4,000 -- were forced to relocate from areas flooded by the dam. Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project USA Final Report: November 2000 Prepared for the World Commission on Dams (WCD) by: Leonard Ortolano, Stanford University Katherine Kao Cushing, University of California, Berkeley, and Contributing Authors Secretariat of the World Commission on Dams P.O. Soon, the battle was joined between the “pumpers” and the “ditchers.”. With the fish went a way of life that had sustained the Columbia Basin’s Native Americans for thousands of years. One of the first, if not the first, published reports of a proposal to irrigate the Columbia Plateau with water from the Columbia River was in 1892, when the Coulee City News and The Spokesman-Review reported on a scheme by a man named Laughlin McLean to build a 1,000-foot-tall dam to divert the entire flow of the Columbia back into the Grand Coulee; he also earlier proposed a 95-mile canal across the Columbia Plateau from a diversion point somewhere farther upriver. A 150,000 horsepower waterwheel for a generating unit is unloaded at Grand Coulee Dam, June 25, 1947.
Roosevelt avoided having to obtain congressional approval for the project by financing it through the Public Works Administration (PWA). Grand Coulee is 450-500 feet thick at its base and 30 feet thick at the top, and it contains 11,975,521 cubic yards (9,155,944 cubic meters) of concrete, three times as much as Hoover Dam. To the generation that built it, Grand Coulee Dam was an untrammeled success. At its most grandiose, the Columbia Basin Project was supposed to irrigate 2.5 million acres of desert.