Trucks dump rock from the construction bridge onto a lumber mattress across the channel of the Missouri River during the closure of the Garrison Dam. The dam was built between 1948 to 1953. Forum File Photo

The quest for water

By Patrick Springer
The Forum

The crusade to route water from the Missouri River to dry places in North Dakota found an early champion in Edward Edson Heerman.

Low water levels in Devils Lake forced Capt. Heerman to dry-dock his steamboat, the Minnie H., in 1909.

It was an undignified retirement for an old gal whose quarter-century of service began by delivering military supplies to Fort Totten and ended as a ferry for summer chautauqua festivals.

And so, when the movement to divert Missouri River water to the east took root in Devils Lake in the 1920s, Heerman had the rudder from the old Minnie H. made into gavels and presented as gifts to curry favor in Washington.

Those early efforts ultimately became, decades later, the Garrison Diversion Unit: 120 miles of canals, pumping stations and other public works that deliver water ... nowhere, really, outside of a few wildlife areas.

Today, 30 years after construction began transforming the North Dakota prairie, the project remains incomplete and mired in controversy.

Almost $600 million has been spent on Garrison Diversion and related projects; it's been authorized three times by Congress, and demonized countless times by economists and environmentalists.

Workers undertake the task of completing construction of one of the eight upstream portals in the Garrison Dam's intake area. Forum File Photo

After decades of bickering and negotiating with neighbors in Canada and Minnesota, Garrison Diversion is left with two formidable obstacles: The 22-mile gap of prairie between its two completed stretches of canals - and the estimated $800 million it would cost to finish the job.

And surmounting those challenges assumes the project could overcome environmental concerns from Canadian officials, who remain unconvinced that water from the Missouri could be treated to prevent transfer of foreign fish species and diseases to the Hudson Bay, via the Red River.

Plans for Garrison Diversion have changed dramatically over the years, altered because of objections about the economic unfeasibility and environmental damage of early proposals.

Schemes to divert Missouri River water originally were driven by desires to irrigate huge tracts of semiarid prairie.

Before Garrison, in 1942, plans called for irrigating 1 million acres in northwest North Dakota with water supplied by Fort Peck Dam in Montana. That evolved into a Missouri-Souris diversion to irrigate 1.1 million acres in the Crosby-Mohall region, but was scrapped in 1947 because most of the soil was unfit for irrigation.

By the time Garrison Diversion was authorized in 1965, however, the number of irrigation acres had shrunk to 250,000. And today, the proposal circulating in Washington calls for only 78,000 acres of irrigation.

The impetus for the metamorphosed Garrison Diversion is to deliver water for municipal, residential and industrial use in eastern North Dakota, principally to stabilize Devils Lake and to assure water for growth in the Red River Valley.

"There's going to be a revival of interest in irrigation, I'm sure," says Russ Dushinske of Devils Lake, a former board member of the Garrison Conservancy District.

Dushinske was in high school when his family moved to Devils Lake in 1930. He saw the lake's level drop dramatically in just one year at Creel Bay. "In 1930 we could swim in the bay and 1931 we couldn't swim anymore. It was that bad."

As a young reporter for the Devils Lake Journal, Dushinske met Sivert Thompson, a local lawyer who galvanized support for diverting Missouri River water to the east; Thompson, in turn, had been a contemporary of Edward Edson Heerman in the quest to deliver water.

Garrison's early nemesis was its staggering price tag: estimated at $529 million in 1957, when grandiose plans envisioned 6,773 miles of main and lateral canals - more miles than the state's highway system at the time - and eight reservoirs, 656 pumping stations to supply water to 41 towns.

Time was not on Garrison's side; it had to wait in line while other massive water projects in the West were built first. "Unfortunately, we tended to be at the tail end of the reclamation projects," says C. Emerson Murray, who served as manager of the Garrison Conservancy District from 1985 to 1994, and whose involvement in the project began in the 1950s.

The cost of completing Garrison Light, as it currently is proposed, is $1.6 billion, including past and projected future spending.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the project encountered another adversary: a burgeoning environmental awareness and activism.

Environmental opposition to Garrison is embodied more than anyone else, in a veterinarian whose specialty is waterfowl diseases named Gary Pearson.

Pearson came to Jamestown, N.D., in 1967 to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Northern Prairie Center. The news at the time was full of talk of the economic promise of the mammoth Garrison project. But Pearson found that many of his fellow wildlife specialists and biologists were skeptics.

In 1974 Pearson served as editor of an environmental impact statement of Garrison by the Institute of Ecology, an experience that convinced him the plan would improve neither water quality nor economic vitality.

"There was nothing about the project that was good," says Pearson, whose outspoken opposition to Garrison ultimately cost his job with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

A pivotal moment in the fate of Garrison Diversion came in 1977, when the International Joint Commission recommended against building any features that would transfer water - and biological organisms - from the Missouri Basin to the Hudson Bay, a devastating development.

"Unbelievable and aghast," Murray says, recalling his reaction. "The United States - well, I might as well say it - had awfully poor representation on the joint commission. It had become a place for hacks."

Pearson, still an active Garrison gadfly, believes state officials erred by not acknowledging earlier the project's drawbacks and switching to smaller-scale projects, as South Dakota did in 1977, when it backed away from the Oahe irrigation project and pushed alternatives.

"They're getting on with water development down there," he says. "We're still fighting over it."

A better solution for delivering water to the Red River Valley, Pearson believes, would be to build a pipeline beginning at Lake Sakakawea on the Missouri and ending at a water treatment plant serving Fargo. He says the cost of a pipeline once was had a preliminary "ballpark" estimate of $400 to $500 million.

The Snake Creek Pumping Plant stands at the Garrison Dam deck elevation of 1,867 feet. Forum File Photo

Although completion of the project still remains an elusive goal, backers still point to notable accomplishments.

Since the project was reformulated in 1986, $335 million has been spent, including $160 million for municipal, rural and industrial water supply, much of which went to the Southwest pipeline to serve Dickinson, N.D., and surrounding communities.

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Key dates in regional water issues

The Forum

1889: The North Dakota Constitutional Convention considers a plan to build a canal from the Missouri River in Montana to divert water to the Red River for irrigation.

1924: Sivert Thompson and others in Devils Lake, N.D., form the Missouri River Diversion Association to promote schemes to raise the lake level and supply eastern North Dakota with water.

1927: The engineering dean at the University of North Dakota proposes diverting water from the Missouri into Devils Lake and the Sheyenne and James rivers via a 30-mile canal.

1935: The Army Corps of Engineers is considering building a great earth dam across the Missouri River near Garrison, N.D.

1944: Congress passes the Pick-Sloan plan, a massive program to build five dams on the Missouri River, including Garrison Dam. Plans later call for 1 million acres of irrigation in northwest North Dakota, authorized as the Missouri-Souris Unit.


Lights illuminate the Garrison Dam construction site. Forum File Photo

1947: Giant earth-moving machines begin forming the embankment of Garrison Dam. Over the years, more than 2,300 men worked on the project, sometimes working round-the-clock shifts.

1953: President Eisenhower dedicates Garrison Dam in a closure ceremony. Reservoirs from Garrison and Oahe Dam in South Dakota flood 465,000 acres of river bottom land in North Dakota.

1965: Congress authorizes the Garrison Diversion Unit to irrigate 250,000 acres and divert water to stabilize Devils Lake - low throughout most of its post-settlement history - and the Red River Valley. The project's estimated cost is $212 million. Earlier authorization attempts in 1960, 1963 and 1964 failed.

1969: Construction begins on the Snake Creek pumping plant to lift Missouri River water from Lake Sakakawea into McClusky Canal, designed to carry water to central and eastern North Dakota. Construction on the pumping station ends in 1976 at a cost of $19.2 million. McClusky Canal is built from 1969 to 1976; it stretches 74 miles, beginning on the east shore of Lake Audubon and ending near the Sheyenne River.

1972: The Committee to Save North Dakota, an organization of landowners along the McClusky Canal route, files suit to require an environmental impact statements for the project.

1973: The government of Canada files a formal request asking for a moratorium on Garrison Diversion construction until concerns can be addressed. The Canadians worry that small foreign organisms could enter the Hudson Bay from the Missouri Basin.

1976: The National Audubon Society sues the government, alleging that the final environmental impact statement for Garrison is flawed. An agreement is reached for a new environmental impact assessment to consider other alternatives.

1977: The Carter administration announces it is cutting funding for Garrison, one of 19 water projects slated for termination. After protests from western governors, the administration relents, but recommends Garrison's irrigation capacity be reduced to 96,000 acres from 250,000 acres.

1977: The International Joint Commission concludes that, even with the best engineering talent and operating procedures, Garrison Diversion ultimately would transfer marine organisms from the Missouri River Basin to the Hudson Bay, via the Red River. It recommends that the parts of the project that could affect waters flowing into Canada - 87 percent of the 250,000 irrigation acres - not be built.

1983: Construction begins on the New Rockford Canal, which extends 44 miles and is intended as the main point of water delivery to eastern North Dakota and the Red River Valley. Construction is completed in 1991.

1984: Serious questions confront Garrison over environmental concerns, land acquisition and the economics of irrigation. Construction on Garrison Diversion is halted, and a high-level commission is appointed to study changes.

1984: The Garrison Diversion Unit Commission recommends major changes in the project, including eliminating the planned Lone Tree Reservoir, which would mean a huge decrease in irrigation capacity. The cost of completing the project is estimated at $1.12 billion.

1986: In a compromise to satisfy environmental critics in the United States and Canada, Congress re-authorizes Garrison, reducing irrigation to 130,000 acres. The new plan emphasizes municipal, rural and industrial water supply, and provides for a $12 million wetlands trust.

1986: A government panel concludes that the original $12.6 million settlement for 153,000 acres paid the Three Affiliated Tribes for 153,000 acres flooded by the Garrison reservoir is grossly inadequate. The panel recommends additional compensation ranging from $178.4 million to $342.9 million.

1990: The Bush administration recommends ending funding for Garrison Diversion in the 1991 budget. An inspector general's report concludes that few, if any, municipal, rural and industrial systems would receive water from Garrison because their locations were impractical or too costly. The report also finds that farmers wouldn't be able to afford their share of irrigation costs.

1991: With Garrison's future in jeopardy, a task force meets to explore strategies for water development in North Dakota. The task force recommends increasing state sales and income taxes to raise $22 million for water projects. The Legislature rejects the water tax package.

1992: In a vote widely seen as a statewide referendum on Garrison Diversion, voters spurn an initiated quarter-cent sales tax for water projects.

1995: The North Dakota Legislature repeals part of a law protecting wetlands. The National Wildlife Federation interprets the move as withdrawal of state support from a collaborative process to reach compromise on Garrison Diversion, and withdraws its cooperation.

1998: The North Dakota congressional delegation introduces the Dakota Water Resources Act, the latest version of Garrison Diversion, calling for 70,000 irrigation acres and seeking $200 million to help complete facilities to deliver water to the Red River Valley, $200 million for water projects on Indian reservations, $300 million for other water projects, $25 million for a natural resources trust and $40 million to demolish and rebuild the Four Bears Bridge at New Town, N.D.

1998: The Canadian ambassador writes to a Senate subcommittee chairman to make clear that Canada remains opposed to diverting water to the Hudson Bay. The ambassador says diversion poses an "unacceptable risk of irreversible damage to Canadian waters from the potential transfer" of non-native fish species and diseases. A Minnesota official testifies about the state's "consistent opposition" to Garrison Diversion.

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