In this story from Sunday’s Auburn Journal, we see the local perspective on the recent American River Authority meeting to discuss becoming the local partner for the Auburn Dam project.
Here is an excerpt.
Familiar ring to debate on dam
By: Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer
Last week's showdown in Auburn over the Auburn dam proved one thing.
Fifty years of arguing has sucked any spontaneity out of the debate.
Protesters wielded signs that could have been written 10, 20 or even 30 years ago.
Many of the speakers on both sides have been battling for or against an Auburn dam for decades.
And the arguments themselves are getting long in the tooth, based on studies that date back to the late 1980s and beyond on issues like earthquake probability, flooding risks, environmental consequences and dam-construction economics.
A new study with new estimates this summer could arm both proponents and detractors with updated perspectives on important issues like costs if an Auburn dam project were to again start rumbling forward. The study is to be released in August, with a new price tag estimated likely in the multi-millions.
Last Monday's board meeting of the American River Authority - including a three-hour marathon discussion on the Auburn dam - has given both sides an early window into the present-day stances of many of the major players.
Chairman Bruce Kranz, a pro-dam supervisor representing the eastern end of Placer County, talked about how construction of the multipurpose mega-project could provide flood protection for the Sacramento area that would be more than double what it would be after a planned Folsom dam raise and levees are improved. Under Kranz's scenario, Placer County could use power and water sales from the dam to pay its portion of the cost of the structure, if the authority took on a local sponsorship role.
But Friends of the River conservation director Steve Evans, who identified himself at the hearing as someone who lives and works in downtown Sacramento, noted that Sacramento, Sacramento County and the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency are not in the American River Authority.
"You can't make decisions for entities in the flood plain," Evans noted. Evans' organization is one of the leading advocates in California of river preservation. Evans has been battling the Auburn dam since at least 1990, when he was hired as a staff member. He added that with higher water levels needed for water and power, and lower water levels needed for flood protection, an Auburn dam would have oddly competing purposes.
Evans was one of several speakers at last Monday's meeting to mention the possibility of an earthquake at the dam site. Studies sparked by an earthquake near the Oroville dam focused attention in the late 1970s on the Auburn dam. Construction, which had been authorized a decade earlier, was shut down soon afterward. Studies would later recommend construction of a dam that could be built to withstand a quake of 6.5 magnitude on the Richter scale and movement of - depending on the study - one to five inches.
Meadow Vista's Gord Ainsleigh, a distance runner and chiropractor, cited three faults at the site and the possibility that the Oroville quake suggested the Auburn reservoirs water-weight would induce its own seismic event.
Ainsleigh said that building the dam would force residents to buy earthquake insurance. In his case, the cost would be $500 a year. Area residents would be forced to pay billions yearly in added insurance, he said.
But another voice from the Auburn dam past - retired U.S. Bureau of Reclamation employee Mike Schaefer - was quick to counter quake arguments with his own.
Schaefer served as the bureau's last Auburn construction division chief, closing the Maidu Drive office overlooking the dam site in the 1990s. He said the bureau recorded more than 30 faults in the area of the dam with many occurring more than 100 million years ago.
Oroville's earthquake-induced seismicity was never proven, he said, adding that there are 55 dams in California more than two million acre-feet - about the size of a multi-purpose Auburn dam."There is not proof any of them had reservoir-induced earthquakes," Schaefer said.
