'Dean of Dams' Dominy Dies

Floyd Dominy, longest-serving Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, died on 23 April 2010. He was 100. He presided over Reclamation during its swan song as the great builder of dams in the Western USA.  He believed that water should be harnessed to serve humankind and he walked the walk.

Shown here are pictures of Dominy at 99 and as Reclamation Commissioner on an invitation to his 100th birthday party.

Here is Reclamation's announcement of his death.

Dominy was born in Hastings, NE. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in economics from the University of Wyoming. In terms of Federal largesse he would later prove to be kind to his adopted state.

Dominy will be best remembered or reviled for his construction of Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell.

His raft trip down the Colorado River with environmentalist David Brower is recounted in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid.

Julianne Couch has a good story about Dominy in the High Country News. Here is a snippet from her report:

One week before Dominy passed away in Virginia at his Angus farm, I spoke to him by telephone. I wanted to talk to the man I’d first learned about long ago from reading John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid. I can think of no better way to write a story than the way McPhee did: You put two enemies in a rubber raft (along with a handful of unsuspecting strangers) and send them all down a wild river together.

That’s what McPhee did with Dominy and David Brower, the Sierra Club president who considered the construction of Glen Canyon Dam his biggest environmental policy failure. McPhee set the stage with both scenery and character. His canvas was the Colorado River, with its mile-high rock walls and hundreds of side canyons. And his characters were equally memorable: Brower, the environmental leader, who saw what would be lost to the rising waters; and Dominy, the determined dam-builder, who learned as a young man in Nebraska that water in a river does no good at all if isn’t made available for people to use.

In the end, it seemed that Dominy and Brower had a blast, drinking beer and occasionally bickering about whether remote stretches of the Colorado were valuable because they were untouched, or wasted because they weren’t being developed.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert featured a critical portrayal of Dominy, who said of himself:

"I have no apologies. I was a crusader for the development of water. I was the Messiah. I was the evangelist who went out and argued persuasively for the harness of water for the benefit of people."

Todd Jarvis sent me this article he wrote on 'Dominy's Folly' - Anchor Dam in Wyoming, which had the undesirable property of not being able to hold water. Dominy's solution was to "stuff every geologist and engineer who worked on the  project in the sinkholes." This was something that Dominy tried to sweep under the rug,  but it ultimately contributed to his downfall.

Download Anchor_Dam_Jarvis

Floyd Dominy was a true dam builder or damn builder, depending upon your vantage point. Either way, it's safe to say he was the most colorful commissioner Reclamation ever had. As dw suggests below it might be appropriate to name a dam after him - no, not Anchor Dam, but perhaps his 'jewel' - Glen Canyon Dam.

“It was boring! Boring, how could it be anything else? You can’t see out from the bottom of a canyon.” - Floyd Dominy, recalling his Colorado River raft trip

Comments

[dw]

rq:

Shorten the building's name to his initials 'FED' then rename the dam. Works all around.

dw

[Burlo Q]

Hey, dw -

How about the BOR bldg in Denver?

rq

[dw]

Love him or hate him, he did leave his mark on the West.

It would seem fitting to name a dam after him. As it's unlikely that a new one will be constructed anytime soon, perhaps Interior could rename an existing dam.

Glen Canyon comes to mind.

dw