Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
Terrorist threat doesn't hold water for many close to dam

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

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COULEE DAM, Grant County — For two people who should be quaking with fear, Fred and Barbara Meyer smile an awful lot.

Their house on the Columbia River is as close as you can get, without a lot of government credentials, to Grand Coulee Dam, a stunningly visible monument to American industry — 12 million cubic yards of sprawling, come-and-get-me concrete.

With their nation at war and parts of the world vowing revenge, the people first in line for the big flood must at least think about lurking terrorists, right?

"HELL, no!" exclaims Fred. "If they dropped an atom bomb on that thing, I'm not sure what it would do, other than kill a lot of people."

Fred, 87, is a World War II and Korea veteran and retired employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the dam. Barbara, 79, is known to locals as "The First Lady of Grand Coulee Dam" for her decades of volunteer work.

The Meyers have lived here, on the downstream side of a wall of water backed up all the way to Canada, since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the first screening of "Dr. Strangelove" — almost 40 years now.

They didn't worry about a dam breach before that big terrorist event back East, which Fred, who keeps cursing his faltering memory, refers to as "that 7-11 thing."

And they don't now.

When it comes up, Fred responds with the same kind of confidence as most other people in the towns of Coulee Dam, Grand Coulee and Electric City.

"It's one hellaciously big piece of concrete."

No argument there. Grand Coulee, one of the most impressive engineering feats of its time, or any, is a football-field-and-a-half thick at the base, and contains enough concrete to pave a two-lane road from here to Fort Lauderdale and back. Staring at its 550-foot-high face on a quiet spring day, it is difficult to imagine a scheme to do serious harm to the dam, let alone bring it down.

But a lot of people in federal offices get paid these days to imagine the horrific. Grand Coulee is considered a "high-value" terrorist target — a status no doubt enhanced by last year's rumored finding of dam-related materials in an al-Qaida terrorist facility in Afghanistan. A new call to arms from Osama bin Laden last week put home-front security back on the front burner, even way out here.

The upshot: Coulee Dam, a town always known for its lights — colorful lasers that dance across the dam's face on warm summer nights — increasingly is becoming famous for its flashing blue ones.

In sleepy Coulee Dam, which under normal circumstances would make Mayberry RFD look treacherous, you can't throw a rock through town these days without hitting a patrol car. Stand on any street corner for half an hour and you'll see police cruisers painted in all colors of the rainbow.

Cops from the cities of Coulee Dam and Grand Coulee. Sheriff's deputies from Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. Tribal police from the Colville Reservation. Washington State Patrol troopers. Police from Coulee City, Elmer City, Othello, Soap Lake and the National Park Service, the latter responsible for Lake Roosevelt behind the dam.

Federal officials, who contract with this scramble of local agencies for security, won't say exactly how many officers are cruising roads and manning gates at any one time. But 22 new ones came on board in the first days after Sept. 11, 2001, and plenty more have followed.

The town in the middle of it all, Coulee Dam, population 1,050, just might have the highest cop-per-capita ratio in the state. And they're not all cruising around in Ford Crown Victorias.

The dam, the largest single hydropower source in the country and irrigation source for a half-million acres in the Columbia Basin, now is being patrolled by armed officers in small boats in a buffer zone that extends a mile upstream on 151-mile-long Lake Roosevelt.

Guided tours through the interior of the dam were halted after Sept. 11. They resumed last summer — with armed guards, bag searches and magnetic screening — only to be suspended again recently because of a new security review and the heightened "orange" terror alert. They may restart if it goes back down, but officials aren't making promises.

It's all a sobering reminder that as the war overseas winds down, even rural people yearning for a return to normalcy might find that normal isn't as normal as it used to be.

This dam, which helped pull America out of the Depression with jobs, was largely completed in wartime, 1941. Even then, and for the first half of its life, you could stroll right across it, hop in an elevator and descend into its bowels — unescorted. You felt like a part owner.

Today, pointing a long lens at it from a public place along the shoreline is likely to draw a once-over from the patrol boat or a white SUV. You feel like a potential intruder.

The effect is even more profound to locals, who note, repeatedly, the irony of a heavy police presence where three of the state's loneliest counties meet. Road closures and new chain-link fencing have cut fishermen off from traditional bank spots, such as "Geezer Beach," an old guy's favorite, on the east side of the reservoir.

"We just can't go where we used to," says Beverly Steel, 81, whose late husband was a security guard at the dam. When they moved here in 1948, the town had twice as many people — and one cop, she says.

Public access to the top of the dam itself has been halted, likely forever — much to the dismay of Barbara Meyer, who sadly reports that participants in a favorite charity, "Walk a Mile for Cancer," can no longer walk over the milelong span.

She admits the desire to feel safe is understandable, and nobody here is weeping about lives ruined. But, given that the only real terrorist attack on their country occurred all the way across the continent, it's hard to blame locals for some frustration.

"I personally think it's a bit of overkill," says Ray Gilman, 65, a semi-retired local school principal who can see the streaked gray face of the dam from the porch of his home on Yucca Street. "They're not going to move this dam. I mean, I guess it's not impossible, but... "

To be fair, many do say they feel safer with more police around. But a few are downright cynical, suggesting the whole thing is little more than a make-work program for cops.

"It appears that the only thing missing," one local resident commented wryly to the local paper, The Star, last month, "is a Krispy Kreme shop and a plan on where to locate it."

Indeed, more than one local small-town police department has boosted its ranks with reserve officers and seven-figure government contracts while most others around the state are trimming. Washington State Patrol troopers sign up for shifts on their off time — almost always at overtime rates. State officials acknowledged paying out more than 11,000 hours of overtime to dam-patrol troopers in the last half of 2002 alone.

The money doesn't come — directly, anyway — from ratepayers or farmers. It's all reimbursed from federal Homeland Security funds. Because Bureau of Reclamation officials, who coordinate security, won't discuss budgets, the total price tag isn't clear. But the annual cost clearly is in the millions.

This is a small price to pay, of course, to prevent a terrorist incident that would create untold billions in damages. Or an awfully big pile of cash to prevent, as ex-principal Gilman would say, "a bunch of old geezers in lawn chairs from plunking down in their favorite spot to hook into a kokanee or rainbow."

Needless fear, or prudent precaution?

They're one and the same around Grand Coulee, where the generation that spent hundreds of millions — and lost 77 lives — completing the impossible dam could never have imagined that the next one would spend millions more to defend it.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.

Harley Soltes: 206-464-8145 or hsoltes@seattletimes.com