Don’t we all possess little quirks or idiosyncrasies? One of mine is the dread of seeing beautiful, productive farm land taken out of production for reasons of the “greater good.” Something that benefits the majority of people always requires some sacrifice or expense incurred by the minority. Here in Fargo we are witnessing the construction of a mammoth project that I hope doesn’t turn into a boondoggle for which people have already sacrificed.
What is called the Fargo-Moorhead Area Diversion Project creeps snakelike around the city for thirty miles. The dirt work plus the accompanying right-of-way take 4,500 acres. Another 30,000 acres are being provided for in what the engineers call a staging area, i.e. reservoir.
It isn’t just a trench or canal since a lot of infrastructure accompanies it. Drive south of Horace and find a large concrete gated dam structure, but that’s not the only one. Two more are being constructed. In order for people to pass back and forth across the canal it will take nineteen bridges to facilitate traffic.
It’s the three billion dollar (that’s with a “b”) projected cost caught my skeptic’s eye. Then, how well will it work in a high water year. We don’t know. My mind always goes back to the McClusky Canal where construction took place from 1969 to 1976. It’s purpose was to transport water from the Missouri River to Fargo and beyond. I still remember the time I drove past one spot near the city of McClusky where the canal cut was deep in order to facilitate gravity flow of water. At its bottom ducks swam amongst the reeds and slough grass. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a boondoggle?
Closer to home the Maple River Dam rose out of bottomland starting in the fall of 2004 with completion in the summer of 2007. Its planners claim it reduced the depth and duration of flooding in 2009 and that without it, downstream flooding would have been significantly worse. One farmer tried to monkeywrench the project by selling a 1.4 acre parcel to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa for some woolen blankets and beads. But that became brushed aside in the court.Whether or not much good comes from the project is something I don’t know, but it cost $30 million to build and claims 2,800 acres of farmland.
The big daddy of North Dakota projects has to be Garrison Dam. Funny thing, its construction cost was a puny $300 million compared to the FM Diversion Project’s cost of $3 billion. Much of the dissimilar numbers though needs to be chalked up to inflation. In an online inflation calculator, that $300 million figure becomes approximately $3.5 billion today. Remember the old maxim: liars figure, figures lie. Mathematicians can refigure the numbers. At any rate, that number does seem to be more in line when compared to the FM diversion.
Resources don’t quite agree as to the size of the dam’s reservoir. One source states it covers 383,000 acres and is the 3rd largest manmade lake in the U.S. That many acres is equal to 597 sections of ground which makes for 16.5 townships. It all needs to be applied to human terms, though. The dam project displaced more than one-third of the Three Affiliated Tribes and took up about 95% of their land. When the tribes signed it over, a famous picture of the tribal chairman is shown crying as he says, “We will sign this contract with a heavy heart … With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation. Right now the future doesn’t look too good to us.”
It wasn’t just Indians who were affected. At the time of procuring the land, white ranchers lived and worked in harmony among them. They suffered displacement, too, and were forced to seek new opportunities and homes, too. My wife knew one family well since they became next door neighbors. At one son’s kitchen table the three of us sat down and learned about their move.
Everything the family owned needed to be moved. They decided to drive their cattle herd to their newly acquired ranch with a crew of four cowboys, plus the family’s head who drove a truck with its box converted to sleeping quarters. On the first morning, friends from the community helped drive the herd through the narrow Four Bears Bridge. Care had to be taken to funnel the cows into the bridge to prevent their falling down the steep riverbank and into the river.
An incident occurred when the herd had successfully walked onto the bridge. A car entered from the opposite end. Some of the cows spooked and turned back causing them to do some hard horseback riding to get the cattle turned. Then when the cows were heading in the right direction they “came off the other end like they were shot out of a cannon.” Now they had another roundup ahead of them. He said, “If they had gotten into those badlands, we would never have found them.” They averaged about seventeen miles a day over a 10 1/2 day period.
Dollar cost can be found easily enough as can the acres of ground involved. It’s hard to calculate costs in human terms, though. For instance, eleven rural cemeteries face some degree of flooding risk in the FM project. On the Fort Berthold Reservation the churches and families developed many cemeteries until 1952, when the Garrison Dam forced the relocation of hundreds of families within the flood plain. The dam led to the loss of farmland, homes, and community infrastructure. While it is easy to criticize all these projects, they are deemed necessary for the greater good. Teddy Roosevelt was the first great environmentalist, but his quote just doesn’t apply here: “Leave it as it is.”
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