Decision in Hell's Canyon

The Northwest's turbulent Snake River is one of the last great U.S. river valleys still unexploited for hydroelectric power. For 125 miles along the Idaho-Oregon boundary line, the Snake tumbles through an almost inaccessible, rocky gorge called Hell's Canyon (see map), where it drops almost twelve feet in every mile. For control of this vast hydroelectric potential, public and private power interests in the power-short Northwest have been fighting for almost five years.

To harness the Snake, the Idaho Power Co. proposed spending $133 million in private funds to build three hydroelectric dams at Oxbow, Brownlee and Hell's Canyon, with a combined generating capacity of 783,000 kilowatts. But under the Fair Deal's Secretary Oscar Chapman, the Interior Department planned a much more ambitious public power program for the Snake. Chapman wanted to build a $559,791,000 multi-purpose dam that would back up the waters of the Snake River into a lake 93 miles long and flood Idaho Power's dam sites. The entire cost for power, flood control and irrigation of 192,000 acres of land around Mt. Home, Idaho would total $842,591,000. While Interior sought funds from Congress to start work, Chapman put pressure on the Federal Power Commission to pigeonhole Idaho Power's application.

Last week, in his first major decision on public power policy, Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay gave Idaho Power the green light to go ahead with its three dams. In a letter to the Federal Power Commission, which must still approve the project, McKay noted that the privately built dams would produce almost as much electricity and flood protection as Chapman's Hell's Canyon project. The first of the private dams could also be completed seven to eight years sooner. In any case, there was now little chance that Congress would vote funds for such a project. Said McKay: "We will not oppose any development by privately owned public utilities so long as their development does not substantially interfere with orderly development of natural resources . . . The Department . . . would ,be playing the reprehensible part of a 'dog in the manger' if it insisted on opposing a badly needed development that private capital is ready and willing to undertake . . ."

Public power advocates charged, of course, that McKay's decision was a "sellout" to private interests. McKay made it clear that his department would still go on building big, multi-purpose dams where private capital could not do the job. But the Administration had decided to let private enterprise have first crack at river valley development jobs it could handle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.