BUILDING THE ULTIMATE DAM

From CHAPTER TEN:

Given the failure of the multiple arch dam to secure a continuing role in American water resources development, what is the significance of John S. Eastwood and his life's work? Is he merely a minor engineer who built a few unusual dams, designed some hydroelectric power systems in the Sierra Nevada, and had a unfortunate tendency to alienate leaders of the American civil engineering establishment? Or does his story help elucidate more elemental issues concerning both technological development and the history of the modern Americna West?


Viewed in the context of Freeman and his opposition to the multiple arch dam, Eastwood's experiences as an engineer highlight the social nature of the technological decision-making process. While the structural form of Eastwood's designs emanated from a highly personalized engineering vision, the activities that determined whether his dams would be built involved a complex interplay amoung engineers, businessmen, bureaucrats, and (to a far lesser degree) the general public. The major performers in each drama were not numerous; in the aggregate, they numbered a few score. However, the social interaction surrounding the construction (or rejection) of Eastwood's designs was intense.


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During the New Deal, the "celebration of mass" became the dominant ideology associated with dam construction: the more material a dam required, the more acclaim and adulation it received. In an era of limits and diminished expectations, American culture apparently derived psychological satisfaction from creating something big in the face of adversity. Thus, the Grand Coulee Dam drew praise for being the first masonry structure in more than three millennia to use more material than the largest Egyptian pyramid. Similiarly, no one complained that the Hoover Dam would have been grossly overbuilt even without its pronounced upstream curve.


Citizens were encouraged to applaud the role of gravity dams in conserving America's water resources, but attention rarely focused on the extravagant use of materials necessary to the maassive tradition. Rather than being related to economy in the quantities of construction material, the term efficiency was used exclusively in connection with standardized design and the development of new methods of material conveyance -- such as employing mechanized bulldozers to distribute earthfill or utilizing huge movable cranes to distrubite concrete.


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Eastwood's work as an engineer occurred within a capitalist milieu that required construction costs to be recouped in strict accord with the financial demands of a market economy. Unlike federal agencies (and their beneficiaries), Eastwood could not depend on public appropriations and political maneuvering to extend a project's repayment schedule. Bearing this in mind, it is easier to comprehend why interest in multiple arch dams faded so quickly. The economic and cultural justification for their construction simply disappeared as dam financing became as much a vehicle for distributing federal funds as it did a fiscal basis for undertaking a water storage project.

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