OCR Text |
Show THE WESTERN WEB 27 construction of the dam. Work was resumed. Violence was averted. The dam was completed. These were the essential parts of the record California presented as the hearings on S. 1175 began. It had a great deal more at stake in the Colorado River Contro- versy in 1947 than did Arizona. More than four million people had migrated to Cali- fornia since 1940. The state's population had passed the ten million mark, and the five million persons living in Southern California were largely dependent upon water and power from the Colorado River. Altogether at this time the residents of Southern California had invested or incurred obligations aggre- gating more than half a billion dollars in projects to bring Colorado River water and power to their farms, homes and industries. These projects included the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct, Parker Dam, the All American Canal, power lines and other developments. Now, in 1947, the State of Arizona was proposing to seriously injure those investments by taking an enormous amount of water from the river for a new project. Moreover, the Bureau of Reclamation was supporting S. 1175, and advocating the building of the great Central Arizona Project. This brought into play formidable forces arrayed against California, as the record soon made apparent. California had made every effort to prepare for the assault. Water and power agencies in the southern part of the state, which would be most directly and most seriously injured by the Central Arizona Project, had held a series of conferences to formulate their opposition. |