Anti-Dam Leaders Plead For a Dry Grand Canyon

The Massachusetts Committee to Save the Grand Canyon in waging war against ignorance, red tape, time, and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall's dams.

If they lose, half the Grand Canyon will be irreversibly submerged under 650 feet of water.

The Committee had all its weapons readied at Emerson Hall last night: movies and slides of the wonders of Nature and the blunders of men who tamper with it, a panel discussion (which was eventually scrapped), and petitions and night letter forms for persuading legislators to vote against HR 4671.

There were signs at the door--more signs than people to carry them.

"Darn Udall's Dams."

More than 100 people came to see what one person called "a poor movie and a spectacular one." Approximately 18 people wrote telegrams to Congressmen and left them for MCSGC to send off.

HR 4671 is a bill now in the House Rules Committee which would provide water for the parched Southwest. In order to finance the project, the bill includes plans for construction, of two dams--one upstream from the Grand Canyon and one downstream--to provide hydroelectric power.

Arizona can sell the power, to help pay for the other parts of HR 4671. The Bureau of Reclamation has called the dams a "cash-register project."

Difficulties with the sound track in the first movie pushed the evening behind schedule, so the Committee decided to cancel the planned panel. "It's a shame," Daniel Hartline, graduate student in biology and member of the Sierra Club, said afterwards. "There were some things that should have been discussed."

The Committee has been meeting every Wednesday throughout the summer, and has already sent a petition to the White House with 2600 signatures, Hartline received "a rather non-committal reply" from Lady Bird Johnson. She said she sympathized but was powerless in this issue.

The "spectacular" movie was actually a series of slides about Glen Canyon, great orange peaks and winding paths which preserved the markings of a lost Indian civilization--until it was dammed. Dramatically, the scene shifts from the Canyon five years ago, to a huge man-made lake which today buries most of it. The same, the audience is told, is now in store for the Grand Canyon