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Show THE THREE-RING CIRCUS 155 time, said Peterson, Arizona had "not availed itself of the opportunity that had existed since 1936, to take some of the energy available to it from the Hoover Dam project." That right, he pointed out, amounted to eighteen per cent of the power developed at Hoover Dam. If Arizona were suffering a power shortage, asked Peterson, why did it not use the power available to it? Arizona's new congressman, Harold A. Patten, stepped up to express the conviction that the committee would not let Arizona down.195 It was confidence that needed no expression. One hardly needed to be a seer to know what the committee would do. Arizona frequently made the charge that the Imperial Irrigation District - Hayden's favorite target - was wasting a million acre-feet of water into the Salton Sea. This, said Arizona, would be almost enough for the Central Arizona Project. Engineeer Dowd appeared to show the committee that water wasted into the Salton Sea was a normal operational loss; that the sea was more than two hundred feet below sea level and was the drainage basin for an enormous area; that the inflow from the valley operations was a normal loss under the conditions, and was well within reasonable and ordinary standards of good irrigation practice.196 Then Dowd struck at Arizona's accusations with data showing there was a return flow into the Colorado River of over 200,000 acre-feet a year from the little fifty-thousand-acre Yuma Project in Arizona. This was a much greater return flow per acre irrigated than that from Imperial, in fact, nearly twice as great. Fred M. Packard, field secretary of the National Parks Association, charged that Bridge Canyon Dam would irreparably damage a part of the Grand Canyon |
