Caught Standing In The Way Of Progress

For 200 years the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been constructing the United States. It has dammed our rivers, lighted our homes, shored up our coasts, flooded our deserts, harnessed our tides and won our wars (with a little help, of course, from other Army units, the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy). What the Corps hadn't ever done, before last August, was lose a major battle—not to ecologists, not to sportsmen, not to mayors or governors or even Robert Moses. And certainly not to villages run by retirees and long-haired hippies.

Well, the Corps lost one, lost it to the little town of North Bonneville, Wash., populated by 400 gritty frontiersmen and one wild Irishman, a town that didn't have enough money in its treasury to buy a new car for its only policeman when the old one broke down. Humiliating? You bet. But it was far worse than that. Precedents were set that might cost the Corps billions. What if every little town that got in its way took advantage of it?

It must be said at once that the Corps did not give in easily. It fought North Bonneville on the town's own terrain, right there in the depths of the Columbia River Gorge, the great Cascade mountain chasm that separates Oregon from Washington. It also fought in Portland, where the district engineer is located, and in Washington, D.C., where the high chiefs live.

The Corps, in fact, fought for four years, which should have been long enough, except that North Bonneville fought for four years, too. Oh, North Bonneville took some casualties—when the battle started, the little boomtown beside the spillway of the mighty Bonneville Dam had 480 residents. But the Corps suffered worse losses. Its new powerhouse project at Bonneville Dam was held up, and now it not only has to build the powerhouse in less time than it had planned, but it has to pay war reparations. The Corps has to build North Bonneville a new town, and not sometime, but soon.

You might wonder how the Corps of Engineers ever got into such a fix. The Corps certainly wasn't looking for trouble when it announced, in 1971, that a new powerhouse would be added to the dam, which is 45 miles east of Portland. After all, the people had spoken. To the Corps, the people was somebody out there who elected the Senators and Representatives who wanted more hydroelectric power for the Northwest.

The site of the new powerhouse wasn't just picked out of a hat, either. The engineers had looked at a dozen alternates before they decided the only one that would work was on the Washington side of the Columbia. This meant cutting a new channel for the river around the Bonneville spillway and moving about 23 million cubic yards of earth, but the Corps had moved a lot of earth in its two centuries. The fact that North Bonneville was sitting right on top of that earth was just a bothersome detail. People could be paid off and sent away—you had to truck dirt. There was even a handy place to put the "spoils," which is engineering for dirt.

About a mile below the spillway was a big peninsular bulge in the Washington shore called Hamilton "Island." Perfect for spoils, and a future park. The park was the real inspiration. The Corps said it would be needed as a "day use" area for the three million tourists who might stop to admire the dam every year (two million stopped in 1974). A decision by the engineers to create a park—not pave one over—might keep the ecologists at bay during construction of the powerhouse. The Corps had had a good deal of trouble with environmentalists over the last decade.

If the engineers had any misgivings about destroying North Bonneville, they were easily assuaged. For one thing, they felt they had invented it—there hadn't been any North Bonneville before the original dam project created a boom-town. For another, the people who hung on after the dam was finished were warned that the area might someday be the site of a new powerhouse. Anyway, the town looked like a loser; just a wide space in Washington's Highway 14, a mile-long snaggle of one- or two-story buildings, many separated by bushy vacant lots, most of them in need of paint or repair. A couple even had false fronts, like the saloons in Dodge City. The cinder-block town hall resembled a Salvation Army mission. A sign on Jerry's Cafe, which slumped like a rusty old double-decker bus, said: BEST BY A DAM-SITE. That's where it was. You could hear the roar of the spillway from the bar.

It was not so long ago that residents were simply shoved off project sites with no more than condemnation money to make a fresh start elsewhere. This time the Corps not only had might and right on its side but money, too. The 1970 Uniform Relocation Act authorized the engineers to pay every owner fair market value for his property and to award him as much as $15,000 additional for "relocation costs." Even renters could get up to $4,000.

The law provided small business people only $2,500 to $10,000 to reestablish their shops and stores. But the engineers weren't worried about that—was any business in North Bonneville worth the minimum? Under the circumstances, who'd want to stay in a run-down town with a lousy climate?