Southwestern Sri Lanka rivers and streams

Transcription

President Roosevelt: I want to give two or three simple facts. This Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, with Oregon on the south side of the river and Washington on the North, when fully completed will produce 580,000 horsepower of electricity, which will give us more wealth ...[applause and cheering] ... a better living and greater happiness for our children. Narrator: When President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated Bonneville Dam, the federal government had taken its first step toward a grand vision, to put to widest use the power of America's mightiest Pacific River. With half a century of history gone over the old dam, that power is widely used indeed. This film was made to remind all of us who benefit from it of what it took to make that vision true. This is a salute to the pioneers and builders of that vision, and to the river that made it happen Narrator: In the 1830, a fur trading expedition under U.S. Army Captain Benjamin Bonneville first surveyed the headwaters of the River that Lewis and Clark had followed to the Pacific. Bonneville's reports guided thousands who crossed the divide to the tributaries of a watershed larger than France. Trappers and wagon trail pioneers, loggers, farmers, railroaders, industrialists and engineers came and marveled at the riches of the land and power of the rivers. Newcomers still marvel today. The Columbia gathers many waters. Some begin on the slopes of the Cascades, volcanic peaks strung along five hundred miles of the Pacific Rim. Some among granite crags of the Rockies along an inland arc from Yellowstone to Canadian ice fields. The Columbia returns the snows from heights nearly three miles above the sea and descends through a country of dramatic contrasts. Most of the River's central valley is a high dessert basin lying in rain shadow between the mountain chains. Here the ancient engines of earth and fire, of air and water have worked on a titanic scale. And in just the latest eye blink of geologic time, the hands and machines of human beings have shaped the landscape too. Again and again, along it's way, the River's current is restrained. And from these man-made waterfalls another more disciplined current flows. Strongest at its source, it moves outward through its branches a River in reverse. Like the Columbia, the stream of electricity defines and extends the unique vitality of the Pacific Northwest. This is, as always, lumber country. It's farm country. Beef country. Aluminum country. Exporting country. It's also vacation country. People country. Newcomers in growing numbers are still being drawn to the Columbia Region in search of its space, its work, its beauty and opportunities for the outdoor life. Only one lifespan ago many Easterners still thought of this as a remote and backward region, a place where natural resources could be extracted. But, in fact, the Northwest was already pioneering a new technology that would become the symbol of a young 20th century. Remnants of early hydro-generating systems can still be seen on smaller streams in the region. They testify to how long a time it was that the big river defied control. But the promise of massive hydropower couldn't be denied. The Columbia would be harnessed within the span of a single human generation. It was a time of extraordinary change. It began on the other side of the Continental Divide in the Mississippi Basin. The Dust Bowl refugees arrived to find the lumber market had collapsed too. They joined the workers and tradesman of the Northwest on the street. People were asking, with all there is to be done in this rich, blessed country, why can't we find work? The federal government responded. There would be work, public works and on a grand scale. Wasn't it time to do something about the Columbia River. Construction workers responded to the call of the Army's Corps of Engineers. Down to the River Gorge too came seasoned electric utility professionals, revitalized bureaucrats, government filmmakers and a young folk singer named Woody Guthrie. And in September 1937, the era of federal power in the Northwest began. President Roosevelt: And now my friends, I'm going to press a button. And that will stop everything going. Here it is. [Crowd cheering and clapping] Narrator: With the dam generating power, a brand new federal agency went to work. The Bonneville Power Administration would market federal electricity, take it right off the Corps of Engineers powerhouse and wholesale it to public utilities and private power companies who would retail it to users. BPA crews began to build a transmission network that would grow to 15,000 miles. The first were the hardest, just struggling out of The Gorge. Where it was too steep for vehicles to carry cross arms and insulators, mules were sent. Where mules couldn't go, men went. Even where the going was easy, distances were great. Sometimes after nightfall, the next day's tower location was marked line of sight with the headlights of the foreman's cars. Mile by mile, BPA's pioneers sticks the slender lines of the new river of power together off the Columbia and across the land. But how much power could a sparsely populated, mostly rural market absorb? Service was far from universal in the countryside. And even the few farmers who had electricity used it sparingly. It was costly. A key provision of BPA's charter law guaranteed that preference and access to federal power would go to publically owned utilities and to the new rural electric cooperatives. The government's aim was to sell power at what it cost to make and create a wide market. Remarkably quickly, it did. When hydropower reached the farm, it brought more than electric lights. It brought motors to ease the heavy chores. It retired the wood fired stove. It brought refrigeration. Best of all, it brought a pump. No more bucket baths on the porch. No more cold outhouse. Running water. It was even more welcome than those lights in the barn. Things were looking up. Upstream from Bonneville in the desert east of the Cascades, an even bigger plan was underway. The Basin is basaltic rock, the product of ancient volcanoes. The river cuts through a layered plateau that was built up of massive lava flows over several million years. Early French explorers of the Basin noted the most prominent feature in this landscape, a deep coulee or canyon, many miles long. Along it's course a string of narrow lakes often gives it the appearance of a river. Geologists say that once it was. For a brief, violent period, this was the main channel of the Columbia. During the ice age, the Columbia flowed in its westerly course across the upper Basin with a volume of water many times that of today fed by an ice sheet covering half the Continent. One of the glaciers pinched off the river and diverted it south. The ice flow and current gouged out a new channel. Before the ice dam yielded and the river returned to it's course, it roared in a cataract greater than any now on earth and left the evidence of its passing behind. This is the evidence, the place now called Dry Falls. The quiet blue lake at the base of the cliffs is two hundred feet deep. Some think the Columbia poured from these cliffs for only a few days. Early in this century, an attorney from a Basin farm town and a newspaper man from the orchard country began to promote a big idea to do what a concrete dam what nature had done with ice. It would just have to be the biggest dam in the world, that was all. Some idea. Visionary. But people kept bringing it up. Grand Coulee Dam. Even in a time of enthusiasm for colossal public works, the audacity of this one astounded everybody who saw it. This dam was going to hold back a river lake one hundred sixty miles along, more than a dozen billion tons of water they said. Part of that water would go to those dry farms. The rest of it could run through turbines. There sure could be a lot of electricity. And it sure would be cheap. Building two dams and the power lines that connected them to the major cities took only half a dozen years. It has been done in the very nick of time. The United States was at war, and the Northwest was ready. Aluminum smelters had already come to the Columbia for its hydropower. Now, BPA hooked up the plants directly to the Bonneville/Coulee grid. And the lightweight wonder metal rolled. Vast quantities of fully mobilized hydropower put thousands of fighters and bombers in the air, and built some of the greatest of the Northwest's industrial capacities virtually overnight. The Columbia's power ran arc welders at twenty-four a day yards in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington building ships for the Pacific war. Some of Coulee's kilowatts went out over lines BPA crews suddenly had to run to a hush-hush new facility in the desert, at a place called Hanford. Afterwards the engineers learned what the mystery load had produced, a small quantity of something called plutonium for the weapons that ended the war. The postwar Pacific Northwest had come of age. It's aluminum and lumber industries turned to the needs of a nationwide housing boom. At Grand Coulee the Bureau of Reclamation turned to the other purpose of it's multipurpose dam. The breakthrough vision of the Coulee project was that with it's own electricity, the Columbia could pump itself up the last few hundred feet and over the canyon wall. Just as Woody Guthrie had wished it, the great big dam was finally throwing water out across that land. By this time, BPA had been throwing transmission lines across the land for more than ten years. And the Basin farmers were ready for a new day on new land. As if by a miracle, the great Columbia River had suddenly changed its course to run right past the end of the rows. More than half a million acres came to life. In the year the first harvest came in from the irrigated Basin, the lower river city of Vanport was swept away. Two dams had harnessed the Columbia but not tamed it. A film made after the 1948 flood shows that the government already had plans for what to do next. Man: If we are to control the rest of the Columbia, we must first develop. Bonneville and Grand Coulee are only the beginning. Tame the hazardous rapids, government engineers say it can be done. And water power is the magic partner in making ... Newscast: At Bridgeport, Washington the hundred million dollar ... Narrator: Soon the news reels had new power dam dedications to cover. Newscast: ...added control on the Columbia River's mighty flood time surges. Power for decades of growth and ... Through the 1950's, county public utility districts, investor-owned utilities and the government's Corps of Engineers invested billions in more dams. Nobody called them boondoggles anymore. Dams had proved themselves. Who could argue? Ed Huruhy: An Indian Chief takes a last look at a spectacle that's going been going on for a hundred years but soon will be history. Celilo Falls on the Columbia River will soon be under water. A huge new dam has been built at The Dalles, downstream from the falls. Narrator: In some ways, building dams was irresistible, clean, cheap power, better than anything else. Vast benefits. The law said that BPA would pay back to the Treasury, with interest, every penny that the hydropower complex cost. But sometimes money wasn't the only cost. Almost ten million kilowatts of hydropower was now in the lines. Besides federal power from federal dams, BPA was carrying locally owned public and private electricity as well. Its high voltage grid was the best way to move power around, from virtually any place with a surplus to places with high demand. But surplus power became more and more rare. In September 1963, President Kennedy came to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to break ground for the region's first nuclear power plant. And he touched on several themes that would echo through two decades. President Kennedy: I want us to stay ahead. You know, in the next ten years, I hope the people of the United States realize it, that we double the need for electric power every ten years. We need the equivalent of a new Grand Coulee Dam every sixty days. We must construct efficient interconnections between electric systems and between regions as has been proposed by means of a Pacific Northwest/Pacific Southwest Intertie. Maybe we can give some of it to California. [Applause] Narrator: Clearly, the time for big plans on the Columbia was not over. If the Northwest grid was going to send power outside the region, much more water would have to be stored upstream. In 1964, the U.S. agreed to finance large storage dams on the Canadian Columbia and buy their excess hydropower. The completion of British Columbia's Micah Dam and others in the river's upper valleys greater increased the average usable flow in the United States. The spillway of Micah became an upstream control for Grand Coulee hundreds of miles below. Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake was no longer the only catch basin for spring snowmelt, nor the biggest Lake on the Columbia. But now a third power house could be carved into the solid rock of the right bank. And eight new turbines could double the dam's output. By the time the new Coulee power house came onto the grid, the problem was that the largest single source of electric power in the world wasn't enough. All the dams together didn't seem to be enough. It looked like the fully electrified and electricity-dependent Northwest wouldn't be exempt from years of energy crisis. In the 1970's, the Northwest power grid began to carry new megawatts of thermal power, from plants who's turbines were driven with steam. Like most of the country, this region was now making a lot of electricity from coal, and uranium. At Hanford, nuclear power technology stands side by side with the Columbia. A working plant fulfills the dream hailed in the sixties of a clean, inexhaustible source of energy. Less than a mile away stands an unfinished plant, a reminder that the future of the nuclear power option remains uncertain. But the flexibility of the grid allows existing different technologies to work together. The Trojan Nuclear Plant typically produces a steady million-plus kilowatts for ten months at a time. While its reactor is refueled, its customers can get a lot of their power from Bonneville dam. Bonneville is still going strong into its fifties, with the original cost repaid as of 1987. Its new powerhouse is an investment that's younger than any nuclear plant in the Northwest. Bonneville keeps earning. A lot of what it earns goes into restoring some of the more delicate balances of the Columbia River. We've learned a lot about those balances. And our best teacher was the region's most admired native. The Pacific salmon was the pride of the region in 1937. Federal hydro planners cared about them from the beginning, when Bonneville's world famous fish ladders were built. But at the beginning, no one knew just how much care salmon would need. Over the years the answer became clear. Much more. In 1980, Congress passed the Northwest Power Act, a sweeping measure that created a new framework, and the Northwest Power Planning Council to help reconcile the region's interests in power, money, quality of life and the claims of nature. The Act also gave BPA a broad mission, to manage Northwest's power and the natural resources affected by it in balance. Using its revenues from the sale of federal electricity, BPA funds one of the world's largest efforts to mitigate the impact of power facilities on fish and wildlife. On tributary streams, where some of the region's oldest small dams obstruct salmon runs, BPA builds fish ladders. It doesn't matter that the old dam never was federal property or that it's been here since before Bonneville. What matters is that salmon can again reach clear shallows were none have spawned for most of this century. Through 1990, the commitment of the region's ratepayers in support of fish totals nearly a billion dollars. Other wildlife habitats are being studied and improved. In the Basin, where the pressure of underground water from dam impoundments forms new kinds of wetlands, in the mountains where the habitats of big-horned sheep is being enhanced and where transmission towers are modified so eagles won't be accidentally electrocuted. In the late eighties, the network stretched a new line eastward across the Continental Divide. These days, helicopters do much of the work once done by men and mules. But somebody still has to climb the towers. And it's still the kind of work you can't do if you're afraid to look down. The trans-divide line links generating plants near the vast coal resources of Montana and Wyoming to customers on the Pacific side of the Divide. Major lines like this one operate at 500,000 volts. Insulators keep such lines some ten feet from any metal structure in the open air. But inside this switching station in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains the circuits safely run through a maze of thirty-six inch tubes filled with an insulating gas. This technology makes it possible to get a critical station out of the weather in a compact space. This station can be run by a single operator. The Celilo Station above The Dalles has a more conventional outdoor yard and a larger crew. It's the northern terminus of the DC intertie to the power grid of California. Inside is an example of BPA's continuing technical pioneering. This room can't be entered by anything as frail as a human being when the device being inspected here is energized. This solid state DC valve converts alternating current to one million volts of direct current. DC is the more efficient way to send power over long distances. And from Celilo to the Los Angeles grid is an 846-mile unbroken run. Such concern for efficiency is a healthy legacy of the 1970's. Even as the great river produces low cost electricity, successful conservation efforts help insure that reserve generating capacity is adequate well into the next century. Narrator: From Canada to the sea, the Columbia is monitored and managed. In a hydropower system only the hydro can be stored. So water is electricity for tomorrow. That makes it tomorrow's cash flow for BPA, tomorrow's repayment on the taxpayer investment in hydropower. And, tomorrow's money for improving the river and its environment. Not much water goes to the sea unused. Water over a dam is being spilled for a good reason, and no more than necessary. Besides power and irrigation, there are a lot of other things we need to do with this fundamental wealth. Its release to a system migration of fish, to regulate the river between here and the next dam downstream, to maintain its recreational shoreline and to maintain three hundred miles of river for navigation. Those who brought a trickle of Northwest hydropower to a flood of progress know that the river is the source of it all. And the Columbia keeps bringing more. Every winter it snows. Every spring it melts. And the rivers run. In every season the Columbia delivers its wealth to a fisherman who thinks of the river as a friend, to a vacationer who thinks of it as a playground and the industry that uses it as a highway, to users of electricity anywhere between the Yukon and the Mexican Border who know of it as a servant. The 1930's vision of a river of power is largely complete. What began at Grand Coulee and here at Bonneville succeeded. And because of that the Northwest has gained the wisdom and the means to preserve its splendid resources of water, of earth and air, and the river of power they made possible for as long as the Columbia rolls. River of Power is presented by Bonneville Power Administration With special thanks to U,S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation U.S. Department of Interior, Washington Public Power Supply System, British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority, National Archives and Records Administration , Oregon Historical Society. Credits [End if River of Power]