Northwest Newspaper Hydropower Articles

McNary Dam fulfills promise

Project at Umatilla celebrates 50th year

By Andrew Binion
East Oregonian

Today there is no such thing as the Umatilla Rapids, a short, treacherous length of the Columbia River between the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams that used to cause grief for barge pilots.

On a spring day in Washington, D.C., in 1939, Walter M. Pierce, a former Pendleton lawyer, governor and then Democratic Congressman from Oregon, told his colleagues on the floor of the House that the Umatilla Rapids was a “bottle neck.”

“It is the stopper that must be removed,” Pierce said.

Before significant local cargo could ship out to the ocean and beyond, before $5 million would be earmarked to build locks at Bonneville, the last bump should be smoothed out in the plan to use the river as a commercial expressway, he urged.

“Pull the stopper out of the bottleneck,” Pierce said.

In 1945 Congress approved the McNary Dam project and construction began in May of 1947.

Fifteen years after Pierce’s speech President Dwight Eisenhower stood on a podium near where the Umatilla Rapids used to be, 292 river miles from the Pacific Ocean, and dedicated the McNary Dam.

Eisenhower used the speech to emphasize his vision of local control over the dam.

“The issue posed to us is: Federal monopoly of power as against public or private regulated power, freely chosen in each instance by the citizens of each area with the federal government drawn in as a cooperating partner."

Construction jobs Government action is only part of McNary’s history. The other part are the people who worked on the dam.

Raised in Kansas and at the time living in Salem, Luther Correll moved to Umatilla for the work. He came to help build the weapons depot but stayed to help build the dam.

The pay was good, about a dollar an hour, and the work interesting, the 89-year-old Hermiston resident said, but sometimes dangerous.

“Accidents weren’t very common,but they happened,” he said.

During the construction of the lock and dam 24 workers perished, said Nola Conway, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Correll tells a story when he fell about 40 feet while working on the dam.

“I hit some boards on the way down and landed on my feet,” he said. He was lucky to be alive, but a doctor in Pendleton diagnosed his injuries as only a chip in a shoulder bone and a few torn ligaments. After taking two weeks off to recuperate Correll headed back to work. But this time he started driving a dump truck, a newfound career he would keep until he retired.

Oley King was already in his 5Os when he got a job working on the dam. Now at 101 years old, the Ocean Park, Wash., resident has many fond memories of his days spent building McNary.

“We were all pretty proud of ourselves,” King said during a telephone interview. “It was a lot of work, and a lot of different jobs. You never knew what you’d be doing when you went to work.”

The Ione native had a background in ranching and bridge building, but he started dredging rivers while working on the dam, a career he called “a beautiful job” and kept until he retired.

Eisenhower’s vision The Bonneville Power Administration is the agency that sells the roughly six million megawatt hours of electricity McNary Dam produces in a year. Starting in the early 1970s, the BPA stopped taking money from the federal government and began supporting itself solely on money raised from selling power.

Mike Hansen, a spokesman for the Portland-based electricity wholesaler, said today’s reality matches up with Eisenhower's vision. He noted that slightly less than half of the electricity used in the Northwest is provided by BPA, the other half comes from investor owned utilities and other sources.

“From that standpoint a federal presence hasn’t stepped in and dominated the market,” Hansen said.

Although dams are often noted for producing electricity, McNary is a multi-purpose dam, originally conceived to make the unwieldy river more navigable. On the Washington side of the dam is a lock system, supporting commercial river traffic from the Pacific to Lewiston, Idaho. On an average day the McNary locks move six barge tows, the same tonnage as eight freight trains or 3,250 semi trucks.

Lake Wallula runs 64 miles upriver behind the dam, providing a myriad of outdoor and recreational opportunities, from camping and fishing to waterskiing and hunting. McNary also provides farmers in the area with irrigation to water their crops.

“It was the start of the building of a local economy,” said Debi Watson, spokeswoman for the Umatilla Electric Cooperative.

East Oregonian
Pendleton, OR
September 23, 2004

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