The Bureau of Reclamation: 110 years providing water and electricity to the West Brit Allan Storey Senior Historian Bureau of Reclamation Littleton, Colorado he American West is generally arid, and water was a major concern of settlers who watched the gush of spring and early summer runoff flow away from their towns and crops. Settlers developed simple and inexpensive water projects, but, as population increased, demands for federal water storage projects grew. Westerners soon understood they generally lacked access to sufficient money and engineering skill for more complex water projects, and they hoped to find those resources in the national government. Those clamoring for “reclamation projects” believed that irrigation would “reclaim” or “subjugate” western arid lands for human use and make homes for American families. Before 1900, the United States Congress had already invested heavily in America’s infrastructure by subsidizing roads, river navigation, harbors, canals, and railroads. Western boosters clamored for extension of that tradition of government subsidies to irrigation to support expansion of western settlement. In 1901, “reclamation” gained an important supporter when Theodore Roosevelt became President. He supported the “reclamation” movement because of his personal experience in the West. President Roosevelt signed the Reclamation Act on June 17, 1902. The original concept was that water users would repay the costs of construction of a project over a 10-year period and would pay all annual maintenance costs. In July 1902, the Secretary of the Interior established the United 80 APWA Reporter
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States Reclamation Service (USRS) within the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Division of Hydrography. The Reclamation Act required that Reclamation comply with numerous and often widely varying state and territorial legal codes. Subsequent development and ratification over the years of numerous interstate compacts governing the sharing of stream flows between states, as well as several international treaties governing the sharing of streams by the United States with Mexico or Canada, made Reclamation’s responsibilities to comply with U.S., state, and territorial water law very complex. In its early years, the Reclamation Service relied heavily on the USGS Division of Hydrography’s previous studies of potential projects in the West so that between 1903 and 1906,
about 25 projects were authorized throughout the West. Reclamation funding originally came from sales of public lands and Texas had no federal lands. As a result, Texas was not one of the original “reclamation” states, but it convinced the Congress to make it a reclamation state in 1906. In 1907 the Secretary of the Interior separated the USRS from the USGS and made it an independent bureau within the Department of the Interior. The Congress and Executive Branch were then just learning that Congress’s initial 10-year repayment period was inadequate, and Congress eventually increased the repayment period to 20 years, then to 40 years, and ultimately to an indefinite period based on “ability to pay.” Other issues also appeared: soil science problems related both to construction
Gibson Dam in August 1929. Gibson was the first dam completely designed using the Trial Load Method which was refined within Reclamation for a decade and had previously been used to assure the strength of designs after completion.
