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KFarm
Joined: 30 Jan 2006
Posts: 98
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
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 Posted: 5/1/2009, 2:25 pm Post subject: Havasupai and the Babbitt's |
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Wow, after doing some research on the flooding in Supai, it really appears there is a story to be written about how the Babbitt family has really screwed this tribe on a number of levels. If anyone wants write a possible award winning story feel free but please give me some credit...lol
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In the 1860s the adventurers who commandeered the high Coconino Plateau from the Havasupai and other tribes, created huge sparsely-vegetated ranches on which to run their cattle. Some families got rich off this land, among them the Babbitts, and with that hegemony came political clout. More than a century later that influence was still in place and one member of the family, Bruce Babbitt, became governor of Arizona and then Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration. In doing so he ironically gained supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and therefore responsibility for the welfare of the Havasupai and their reservation deep in the great canyon. But Babbitt Ranches continued to own and operate huge tracts of land on the plateau; in particular they continued as owners of Cataract Ranch that included the land at the head of Cataract Canyon. Cataract is a major tributary that flows into Havasu Canyon some 35 miles from the ranch house and just a short distance above the village of Supai.
The one precious resource needed for the cattle to thrive on the high plateau was water. Not that it did not rain. However, rain tended to come in torrential downpours and would quickly run off the rock and soak into the desert leaving little for drier times. The solution was to build dams to hold the water. In the early days there was virtually no regulation of these structures and ranchers built crude, unengineered berms to hold the water. Even after the dams came under the jurisdiction of the state of Arizona in 1973, there were so many of them in remote locations that oversight and evaluation lagged far behind. Cataract Dam was never examined even though the state law mandated inspection every five years. Moreover the structures tended to grow with time as ranchers sought to strengthen and expand their facilities. So it was with the Cataract Ranch. The Babbit's dam started out life as a modest structure just a few feet tall. But by 1929, when the State of Arizona passed a law requiring that all dams be registered, James E. Babbitt complied stating that the dam was 15 ft tall. By the time of the events recounted here, it had somehow grown to 20ft. While this additional 5ft difference does not seem like much, in fact, it implies more than a doubling of the stored volume of water.
Late in February 1993, torrential rains came to the Coconino Plateau. The runoff was compounded by a series of storms. A deluge of water gathered strength as it was funnelled down into Cataract Canyon and came raging into the makeshift dam, causing it to overflow and to begin to disintegrate. As the dam failed an enormous wall of water went crashing down Cataract Canyon toward the Havasupai village. Fortunately, someone had thought to warn the tribe who, as night fell, scurried to their refuges of higher ground in the nooks and crannies of the red sandstone walls surrounding the village. The tidal wave hit the village sometime after midnight. It carried away just about every structure the Havasupai owned, their entire centuries-old irrigation system, their cattle, fields, crops and orchards. It scoured their hallowed burial grounds scattering their ancestor's remains down the canyon. Even the beautiful waterfalls and blue-green pools were violated. The ancient travertine retaining walls that took so many years to deposit were sliced way in seconds leaving muddy sloughs where the blue-green pools had been. The destruction was total and cataclysmic. As the flood subsided and the Havasupai ventured down from their refuges they found only a sea of mud sprinkled with a few belongings and dead animals.
The tribe was accustomed to occasional floods but nothing like this had happened in their long tribal memory. However they knew there was no alternative but to go to work with their hand tools to rebuild the village. Of course they applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for disaster relief. The response from Babbitt's federal agency was truly underwhelming. It was two months before the BIA authorized $823,000 for cleanup and repair of the tribe's damaged infrastructure and even then the money was not released until the angry intervention by Senator John McCain. Not only was the money nowhere close to that needed to restore the infrastructure of Supai but the grant also stipulated that none of the funds could be used to generate improvements over preflood conditions. There was little hope of improving tourist facilities, and therefore boosting the tribes principal source of revenue. To this day (2004) the trail to the spectacular waterfalls remains in dangerous condition. Meanwhile, the federal government was eagerly helping Babbitt Ranches assess damage to Cataract Dam. The Department of Agriculture sent a seven-person team to to survey the area, create a contour map and compute capacity data for the reservoir behind the private dam. That assistance came while Bruce Babbitt was secretary of the Interior. Some of it came while he still held an ownership interest in the Cataract Ranch and, therefore, the dam itself. Six months after the flood Bruce Babbitt sold his interest in the Cataract Ranch; it is unclear how much responsibility he had for the actions of the Cataract Ranch leading up to the dam failure. It makes one wonder whether anyone in government, state or federal, cared about the poor Havasupai.
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Full Article
THE FAR SIDE OF THE SKY
Article the 1993 flood
VILLAGE OF THE DAMMED
Now guess who owns Redlands Dam... Owned and operated by Redlands Ranch, a Babbitt Ranches facility.
Seems the Havasupai have fallen victim to the Babbitt family once again.
Another great article... A little more insight of what happened in the 2008 flood...
Canyon Views, The Flood of 2008
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Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.
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azbackpackr
Hi Tech Wizardess
Joined: 31 Dec 2005
Posts: 3639
Location: Needles CA
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| Posted: 5/2/2009, 4:50 am Post subject: |
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This is a very interesting topic!
The overgrazing on the rim and also below the rim is truly atrocious, and I believe, may have contributed as much to these floods as the weak dam did. If there was vegetation to hold the water in the ground then the gully-washer wouldn't have gotten so big as to endanger the integrity of that dam.
I have come to believe that cattle grazing is really not a good thing for these Western public lands. It is cheaper and more efficient to raise cattle east of the Mississippi. Also, if we all ate a lot less meat, then more food could be produced on less land. It takes a lot of land to feed a cow, whether you are grazing or you have acreage in livestock feed production. Using the same farmland to raise rice, beans, wheat and other protein crops for direct human consumption makes a lot more sense. It would also be healthier for us to eat more vegetable protein, we'd have fewer heart attacks and strokes, less diabetes, etc. |
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PageRob
Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Posts: 859
Location: Page, Az.
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| Posted: 5/2/2009, 6:16 am Post subject: |
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Yes, using animals isn't as efficient as eating what grows out of the ground. But humans, however, have evolved to eat a mix of animal and plant food, so I don't agree that it would be healthier to eliminate meat from our diet. Perhaps eliminating enormous portions and fried food would do more to reduce heart attacks, strokes, etc.
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Anywhere is within walking distance if you spend the time. |
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Shawn
I'll sell you map to Lost Dutchman mine!
Joined: 03 Jan 2003
Posts: 2592
Location: Ahwatukee, AZ
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| Posted: 5/2/2009, 6:36 am Post subject: |
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| azbackpackr wrote: |
This is a very interesting topic!
. . . It would also be healthier for us to eat more vegetable protein, we'd have fewer heart attacks and strokes, less diabetes, etc. |
. . . . thus more people?
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The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see. |
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