A Little Dam History
Grand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington. In the United States, it is the largest electric power producing facility and the largest concrete structure. It is the fifth largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world. The dam is flanked by a popular Grand Coulee resort.
The dam was built under the auspices of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation as part of the Columbia Basin Project for irrigation of desert areas of the Pacific Northwest and for the production of electricity. Central Washington’s Columbia Basin was a slightly over-ambitious candidate for a dam. The Columbia was by far the largest river anyone had ever considered damming. A Spokane group wanted a safer 134-mile gravity flow canal from the Pend Oreille River at Albeni Falls. And the original low dam design would have have been useful for regulating navigation flows, and for hydroelectic power, but it would have been too far below the top of the canyon to make it useful for irrigation of the fertile loess soil of the basin. The controversy over which project should go forward was a central issue of Washington state politics in the 1920s.
By the 1930s, after thirteen years of debate and several studies, and with the Depression in full swing, Roosevelt was eager for large public works. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the dam as a Public Works Administration project, and Congress appropriated funding for the low dam. Two years later, the authorization was changed from the low dam to the far more expensive, and technically challenging, high dam of today.
