Mighty Coulee

Enormous concrete edifice in Washington state credited with amazing feats — mostly good

By Dispatch  • 

GRAND COULEE, Wash. — Many accomplishments — and calamities — are credited to the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydroelectric producer in North America and one of the world’s largest concrete structures.

It ended the Depression! It killed American Indians’ salmon! It won World War II! It launched Woody Guthrie to stardom!

That’s a lot of rhetorical weight to bear for a structure conceived as a giant irrigation project.

But standing atop the mile-long structure that holds back the mighty Columbia River, a visitor can easily understand the mythology that has built up, like so much silt, behind the massive marvel, a pinnacle of mid-20th-century engineering and technology.

A dam at the site had been debated for decades before the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a proponent of huge public works projects, sealed the deal in 1932.

When the dam was completed 10 years later, it was the largest masonry structure on Earth, topping the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt — the previous record holder (for about 47 centuries). The 550-foot-high dam is more than four times as wide as Hoover Dam and holds enough concrete to circle the Earth with a 4-foot-wide, 8-inch-deep sidewalk.

A visitors center built in the 1970s tells the story of the dam and its effect on the people and the land.

The construction provided thousands of jobs during some of the worst years of the Great Depression; in all, more than 8,000 people worked on building the dam. Water from Lake Roosevelt (of course) is used to water hundreds of thousands of acres of arid cropland.

Electricity generated by the dam is used throughout the Pacific Northwest and helped power World War II-era aircraft and munitions factories — including the Hanford Site, the Manhattan Project facility that produced the plutonium for the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan.

One exhibit highlights the efforts of folk singer-songwriter Guthrie, who was hired by the federal government to help promote the project through songs such as Roll on, Columbia (sample lyric: Your power is turning our darkness to dawn) and The Grand Coulee Dam (Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum, making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum).

Visitors can also hear interviews with some of the workers who helped build the dam and Indians who had lived along the river.

The lake created by the dam flooded thousands of acres of tribal land, including some salmon-fishing waters, for which the tribes received little compensation.

A deeper look at the loss can be had just downstream from the dam at the Colville Confederated Tribal Museum, where the tribes share their history, their culture and their pain. An especially touching display features old movies taken of some of the last annual traditional gatherings and salmon hunts at the now-inundated Kettle Falls.

Visitors who are so moved can donate a few bucks either through a donation box at the museum or next door at the tribal casino via slot machine.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam, stages a nightly laser-light show projected against its face. The bureau also offers a free tour of a power plant located inside the dam. The same tour gives visitors a chance to stand atop the massive structure and look at the magnificent scenery that surrounds the dam and the tiny towns of Grand Coulee and Coulee Dam.

The rugged landscape is called “channeled scablands” and does resemble giant, partly healed wounds, all painted in the oddly muted and beautiful colors of rock-hugging, drought-tolerant sagebrush, bitterbrush, bunch grass and lichens.

The otherworldly scablands, including the steep-walled gorges known as coulees, were carved by massive, recurring ice-age floods. A documentary film at the dam’s visitors center tells the fascinating and unlikely story of those floods and of their discovery by modern geologists.

The floods were spawned by the huge glacial Lake Missoula in present-day Montana. The lake’s waters were held back by an ice plug, a natural dam that dwarfed Grand Coulee.

Periodically, the glacial ice gave way catastrophically and almost instantaneously, spawning 400-foot-high walls of water moving as fast as a freight train, barreling through the Pacific Northwest with a load of churning, crushing, scouring rock that carved out natural features that usually would be created over eons.

Thus, even while we celebrate humanity’s Promethean creations, we are reminded to give nature its due.

I think even FDR and Woody Guthrie could live with that.