Rinconada
Lake, the
World Bank
& Other Dam Fantasies
by
Richard Krejsa
The date is March 3, 2009, and a champagne bottle is about to be broken against a large cliff of concrete. An excited crowd of North County local politicians, their supporters, and local and state media reporters are gathered at the overlook site, near El Camino Real and Santa Barbara Rd., where once there was an imaginary dividing line between the growing, laid-back and rural-sprawling City of Atascadero and the so-called South Atascadero neighborhood. The former green belt area between the two now is located at the base of the newly-completed Atascadero Dam, which extends from Highway 101 and/or El Camino Real on the West, to the base of the South ridge of Rocky Canyon on the East. It is the 2nd dam ever built on the main Salinas River.
Plans for Atascadero Dam surfaced after the City of San Luis Obispo’s failed attempt, in 2001, to build two huge gates on top of the existing Salinas Dam to increase storage capacity at Santa Margarita Lake (built by the U. S. Army, in 1941). At a crest height of 35 meters, the new dam will hold back a reservoir which, when flooded, will fill all but a few miles of the area below the existing Salinas Dam, an area of some 25,000 acres (~10,000 hectares) formerly occupied by South Atascadero and the complex of villages and communities to its south, i.e., Garden Farms, Spanish Oaks, Santa Margarita, the 3000-acre Margarita Vineyards, the elite golf course and gated community of Rossiville, the Santa Margarita Community Cemetery, and the Rinconada Ghost Town, former gateway to old Santa Margarita Lake.
Highway 58, which once terminated at El Camino Real, on the edge of the drowned community of Santa Margarita, now ends at the base of Calf Canyon, near Park Hill Rd. Rural residents from the back-country communities of Park Hill, Huer Huero, and Pozo will be inconvenienced slightly by having their access to Highway 101 routed via Creston. But to take some of the sting out of this change in local history, the district’s ruling politician, 5th term Creston Supervisor Mike Ryan, has arranged for the new reservoir-lake formed by this dam to be called Lake Rinconada. He also has announced that the 36 year-old Santa Margarita Advisory Committee, the first county advisory body to consist of member representatives democratically elected by the people in their neighborhood rather than hand-picked members appointed by the District Supervisor, will no longer be needed since more than half of the neighborhoods have been flooded by the new dam. According to Ryan, this is really a small price to pay for progress and the many benefits that will accrue to the majority of the North County population.
At least three major benefits have been promised. First among these are the recreational opportunities created by the new reservoir. Many watercraft advocates (gasoline and/or wind-powered) as well as campers, duck hunters, and sports fishermen are jubilant and claim that (even though it will block the rehabilitation of the federally-listed threatened steelhead population of the Upper Salinas River) the new lake will become a mecca for largemouth bass and striped bass fishers and a boon to the fishing-hunting-camping aisles at Wal-Mart.
Second, Lake Rinconada will not only offer flood control to downstream areas and generate 550 megawatts of electric power, it also will store well over 100,000 acre feet of precious fresh water for use primarily by the strip cities of Atascadero, Templeton, Paso Robles, and other downstream cities now in process of petitioning LAFCO and the County of San Luis Obispo for expansion or incorporation.
After a prolonged fight with North County cities, the old county seat city of San Luis Obispo recently took over ownership of Santa Margarita Lake from the Army Corps of Engineers. However, the city will be entitled to purchase only 2500 acre feet of newly-impounded Lake Rinconada water. The rest is reserved for use of current or proposed North County cities.
And last but certainly not least, the family entertainment possibilities at this new North County tourist destination site will rival anything yet seen at Las Vegas, or Laughlin, Nevada. The SLO County Board of Supervisors, headed by 6-time chairman Michael "King" Ryan, purchased all the land at county taxpayers expense and, with the help of a half-billion dollar loan from the World Bank, also to be repaid at 14% interest by taxpayers, transferred ownership to global conglomerate Disney-Rossi-Daewoo Corp. (DRDC), which will happily privatize the profits.
One small, unimportant detail remains to be addressed by the County Board of Supervisors. The residents of South Atascadero, Garden Farms, Spanish Oaks, and Santa Margarita, were not, according to Supervisor Ryan and DRDC executives, using the resources of this now-submerged area to their full economic capacity. Thus, they had to be removed forcibly from their homes and farms. Some of these original villagers, and their primitive extended families within the communities, claim to have happily subsisted on their lands by a quaint but now outmoded philosophy of voluntary simplicity which favored local communities using bartering of old skills and even local-made money as a way of life. However, in this age of globalization and world free trade, such pre-modern, economic viewpoints and practices in local economies are totally unacceptable because the major corporations lose out on these unreported sales.
Those persons displaced directly by the construction of the dam, or those who, indirectly, have been forced to move by the rising waters now submerging their former village sites, are being unreasonable in their demands. These "oustees", as they are called, say that the $500 dollars/ acre buy out of their land, negotiated with DRDC by SLO County, is not sufficient recompense. They claim that $10/square foot of floor space for their old homes is not enough! Those who currently live on prime agricultural lands even expect to be given land of equal soil fertility! With frequent oustee protests at the County Government Center, the Sheriffs’ Department (and local police often called in to help) has found it necessary to use rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray to break their resistance. "Why can’t these oustees just accept their fate and stop wasting our tax dollars?" seems to be a commonly heard opinion in the local Starbucks, Court Street sushi bars, and in The Telegram, a free weekly, ad-bound throwaway newsletter.
Thought to be organized and funded by underground rabble-rouser organizations like LOPE, SMART, CUSP, HOPEDANCE, and ECOSLO, these oustees have refused to be resettled on land recently clear-cut especially for them out of the old eucalyptus groves on Nipomo Mesa, or on steep hillside lands in Cambria where the pine pitch canker recently devasted the remaining groves of Cambria pines! Many of these marginalized people have even refused the free plots of land assigned to them in California Valley! These ungrateful oustees say that water resources in these settlement areas are unproven, the soil is poor, and the land is too barren to re-establish their old culture! Some people are born to whine!
Many of the oustees claim they were separated from their families during the DRDC-funded resettlement effort, e.g., fathers and sons sent to different areas of Nipomo Mesa, or brothers sent to completely different regions, i.e., one brother to Cambria, the other to California Valley!
The cultural editor of the daily SLO County Gazette has reported that family- and extended-family inter-relationships have become unglued; many families which had refused to accept any of the resettlement sites in Nipomo Mesa, Cambria, or California Valley, have simply disappeared, becoming swallowed up in slums of the Atascadero-Templeton-Paso Robles-Bradley Metroplex, now served by Lake Rinconada, or in the San Luis Obispo-Avila-Five Cities-Nipomo Metroplex corridor! Many have had to go onto the welfare-workfare roles.
Meanwhile, a number of the original oustees have returned to the proximity of their old villages, attempting to scrounge a living in the oak-forested foothill regions near the privatized shoreline communities bordering the flucuating levels of Lake Rinconada Reservoir.
Do all or many of the above statements and comments seem outrageous and far-fetched? Well, it may not yet be true for the towns described above, but one has only to change the names and localities and they become truly accurate descriptions of many places in the majority world where rivers are being dammed, and cultures are suffering the consequences at a furious pace.
Starting in about 1949, just after the major 20-year dam-building spree in the U.S. came to a halt, about 35,000 large dams (defined as 15 meters or more from foundation to crest) have been built worldwide. China built more than 19,000, and India built more than 3,300 since obtaining its independence in 1947. Combined water storage capacity of these dams is estimated at ~ 10,000 cubic kilometers, i.e., 5X the volume in all the rivers of the world and covering more than 400,000 square kilometers (an area equal to the combined acreage of the following states: ME, NH, VT, MA, CT, RI, NY, & PA)! Such dams have flooded fertile plains, wetlands, forests and rich fish and wildlife habitats worldwide with severe ecological and cultural consequences.
It is conservatively estimated that during this time, 50-60 million people have been displaced and forcibly resettled! During the current decade, the World Bank estimates that approximately 10 million people per year have been displaced by infrastructural development programs. Most of these people have been poor and politically powerless and a disproportionate share, estimated at 40-50+%, have been members of indigenous communities. In India alone,< >20 million people have been displaced and < >75% of these have not been rehabilitated!
In the world of global economics, development and wealth for some few has been built on the impoverishment of many others! The social and environmental costs of dams have never been fully accounted for while the economic benefits are always overestimated. "Forced resettlement tears communities apart and disperses the fragments" according to William F. Fisher, (Cultural Survival Quarterly, 1999, 23 (3): pp. 29-32). And one ever-present factor in much of this dam building seems to be the assistance of the U.S.- and western- dominated World Bank.
About now, you might be asking: "How can I be so sure that this is a valid assessment?" And I would answer: "Because I’ve been there and witnessed it at an early stage in the beginning of the now world-wide resistance movement to the continued construction of mega dams.
In February-March, 1990, I was one of eight persons chosen to go on the first Global Exchange reality tour to India. In 3 weeks of early eco-reality tourism, we visited local residents, public officials and workers at three national/international sites: Bhopal, site of the Union Carbide Corp. chemical explosion disaster in Madhya Pradesh State and where hospitalized "survivors" are still dying at the rate of one per day; the construction site of the 260-meter-high Tehri Dam, in the Himalayan foothills of Uttar Pradesh, where 27,000 hectares of ancient, traditional terraced ag lands will be flooded and 100,000 people will be displaced; and, finally, on the sacred Narmada River which cuts across the middle of the Indian sub-continent, and where the Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) calls for 30 major, 135 medium, and 3,000 small dams to be built over the next 50 years in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujurat States.
Centerpiece of the NVDP is the multi-billion dollar project known as the Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD), 4000 feet wide and rising to the height of a 45-story building! When its canals, irrigation plants, and transmission lines are finally constructed, it will take the land and forever disrupt the lives of over 320,000 people. It will be the biggest water development scheme in India and, perhaps, in the world. But it cannot stand alone and must be supplemented by three other large reservoirs upstream, the Narmada Sagar Projects. These reservoirs, when and if completed, will displace another 200,000 people at an estimated final project cost of $1.6 billion dollars!
In 1989, the Save the Narmada Movement (NBA) was formed as a national coalition of those who opposed the building of SSD. With help from NBA leaders, we eight Global Exchange (GX) observers were taken to three villages, previously never visited by western observers, near the dam site where the people have pledged that they would choose to be drowned by the rising waters rather than leave their ancestral villages along the sacred Narmada!
Our GX tour group interviewed politicians in favor of, and activists opposing, the dam; we talked with the contractors and engineers building the dam; we talked to the businesses which would be flooded by the dam; and we talked to the leaders and to the tribal village people (adivasis), who would be forced to leave their prime agricultural lands or their forest holdings.
From all these interviews, we formed lasting impressions of the complex of philosophical, moral, and economic forces which are conflicted there, elsewhere in the majority world, and also right here in river city! The terms "voluntary simplicity", "self-sufficiency", "locally-grown", "sustainability", "trust" and "community" have no place in the WTO developmental vocabulary. Instead, the motivation is: greed for ever-increasing wealth; the need for monuments to national progress; a blind but false patriotism committed to modernization and technology; the ability to conquer and tame nature; and similar expressions of the mentality and developmental ideology, as recently characterized by President Clinton, Vice-President Gore, former Senator Bradley, and Gov. George W. Bush, all in love with NAFTA, GATT, and, with the WTO.
As a poster child for political corruption, the Sardar Sarovar Dam project has been the site of some of the largest non-violent protests ever held in India. A few days after we left New Dehli, in 1990, more than 50,000 protesters blocked the main highway from Bombay where it crosses the Narmada R. Protests of 10,000 to 50,000 have occurred since at various active or proposed sites contained in the NVDP. Similar and equally large protests have occurred also at Tehri Dam. The activism stirred by these protests in India has now extended to Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, China, South and Central America, and even to Africa where, with financial help from the World Bank, many mega-dam projects are either under construction or on the drawing boards.
The formation of several international non-government organizations (NGOs) such as the International Rivers Network, in Berkeley, CA, Cultural Survival, in Cambridge, MA, Witness for Peace, in Washington, DC, etc., and the advent of the internet has facilitated the formation of global coalitions of indigenous peoples and anti-dam activists, as well as with environmental and social justice advocates. Thanks mostly to these brave activists and NGOs, the idea that, just perhaps, dams need not be a permanent part of rural landscape is now rooted in deep soil. Whether we in SLO County ever have to till that soil could well depend on how you cast your vote for the District 1, 3, & 5 supervisor races in the March 2000 primary election.
Recommended Resources
• International Rivers Network: www.irn.org
• Friends of the Narmada River: www.narmada.org
• World Commission on Dams: www.dams.org
• Cultural Survival, Inc.: www.cs.org
Cernea, M. ed. 1999. The Economics of Involuntary Resettlement: Questions and Challenges. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Cultural Survival Quarterly. 1999. Going Under: Indigenous Peoples and the Struggle Against Large Dams. Cultural Survival Quarterly. 23 (3).
McCully, P. 1996. Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London and New Jersey: Zed Press.
Dr. Richard J. Krejsa is Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at Cal Poly, former SLO County Supervisor, District 5, and member of the SLO Green Party County Council Central Committee.
