POWER: Full Bucket

Under floodwater last week lay large parts of the Colorado River valley around Austin, Tex. Mightily displeased were scores of washed-out farmers who turned up at the capital, demanded to know what had happened to the Lower Colorado River Authority’s four-dam flood control and power project, engineered by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation with $15,000,000 of PWTA funds. Mightily pleased, on the other hand, was Price Campbell, publicity-wise president of West Texas Utilities Co. which stands to lose a 200-mile circle of its power customers to the Authority. President Campbell thought he had found a good demonstration of an old powerman’s axiom: That power generation and flood control are conflicting purposes, because an empty dam cannot run generators and a full dam cannot store flood waters.

Mr. Campbell snorted: “You can’t catch water in a bucket that is already full.” Authority Chairman Fritz Englehard retorted that the flood control phase of the project will not be complete until Marshall Ford Dam is finished, 18 months hence. The present dams are not supposed to. control floods, but to produce power. Even so, the uppermost dam, Buchanan, would not have been too full to hold the flood but for inadequate river readings from upstream, which had let floodwaters catch the engineers napping. Dissatisfied flood victims, remembering that the Authority had taken credit for holding back a similar flood in 1935, got both PWAdministrator Ickes and the State Senate to start investigations.