National Affairs: Power for Defense

Hell & high water they had endured for seven years and seven months. The work had not stopped night or day except on Christmas, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. Seventy-two of them had been killed. Their monument was in concrete, in the biggest thing men had ever made on earth. Grand Coulee Dam towered 550 feet from the ancient bed of the Columbia River, spanned three-quarters of a mile from bank to bank; behind it the waters had piled up in the beginnings of a lake that one day will stretch 151 miles to the Canadian border.

Even last week, on the day when the first generators were to start operation, sending power 266 miles to Tacoma’s shipyards, 260 miles to Seattle’s Boeing bomber plants, the work could not stop. The roustabouts, cat jockeys, bulldozers, greasers, welders, dynamiters, mixers, drillers, riggers, still pressed for time, worked on, unmindful of little ceremonies and speeches before movie cameras. With the precise delicacy of spider legs, the slender, giant cranes moved steadily on, lifting twelve-ton buckets of concrete to pour on the dam’s western heights. “Dinky” skinners drove trains of concrete buckets over the sky-high trestle; tin-helmeted shove runners and gear-jammers, tools in their belts, plowed on with their job: to move 1,000,000 feet of dirt out of a slide area.

On the west vista, overlooking the giant dam, a little clump of 10,000 people stood to hear Washington’s balding young Governor Arthur Langlie declare that the Grand Coulee was now in service. Down in the concrete labyrinths of the powerhouse, below the main generator pits, bigwigs gathered on Level 991† around microphones; there stolid Indian bucks and squaws from Colville Reservation watched Chief Jim James pay tribute to the men who had drowned the hunting ground of his ancestors in a new American dream.

A message came from the President (“a fine job well done”). Tall, white-haired Supervising Engineer Frank A. Banks spoke; an engineer turned water into the turbine of Number Two Genera tor; another adjusted the generator’s speed, a third, voltage. A round dome top-light began burning. Construction Engineer A. F. Darland, grey-haired veteran of dams, watched the dial of a gauge to check the moment the generator syn chronized with others at Bonneville, 450 miles downstream. When the arrow stood straight up he slammed the switch. Coulee’s power was linked to the U. S.

Only two generators, large by ordinary standards, puny by those of Coulee’s future, went into operation. The two supply 10,000 kilowatts. When the huge Westinghouse generators start pumping juice into the Northwest, these two will serve only to supply light and power to the dam itself. The first Big Bertha —whose parts, weighing 2,367,000 pounds, took 38 freight cars to carry them — will start in midsummer, will produce 108,000 kilowatts. When it and others like it are all turning, they will be able to pour into transmission lines 2,700,000 h.p. — about one-twelfth of all the power now produced in the nation.

Across the continent a cautious man smiled a cautious smile. Canada’s Prime Minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, is a middle-sized man with a care-furrowed brow, a neat round head neatly fringed with grey hair, and a fond expression. Cares and grey hairs come to him from troublesome Premier Mitchell Hepburn of Ontario and scholarly Premier Adelard Godbout of Quebec; his fondness is reserved for Franklin Roosevelt. Last week Mr. King was happy: Messrs. Hepburn & Godbout were for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. Mr. King apprehensively asked whether the U. S. Government was really ready to go ahead.

Back fired an answer from the President, who has known his own mind about development of the St. Lawrence for some 30 years: “Construction should commence at the earliest possible moment”; the U. S. Government regarded the project as “a matter of vital necessity.” He said that the opening of the St. Lawrence deep waterway as an outlet for naval and cargo ships to be built in Great Lakes shipyards would be just the opposite of a diversion of funds and resources from defense; that a long-drawn-out war would demand building “several times” as many shipyards as are now available.

The construction schedule called for completion, within four years, of dams, new locks, dredging operations in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterways. Total present estimated cost: $262,170,000. But even this huge sum did not worry some citizens so much as the President’s argument, which implied that, barring the occurrence of colossal, unforeseeable events, World War II had over four years more to go. No other reading could be put on his demand for urgent construction of a power project that cannot produce power before 1945, even if work should start tomorrow. People winced, pulled in their belts, tried to guess how many hundred billions the national debt would be by then, wondered whether their basements would make good air-raid shelters, wished a lot more Grand Coulees were making aluminum this week for a lot more airplanes.

†All Grand Coulee galleries and installations are located by reference to their altitude above sea level; top of the dam is Level 1,310.