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Northeast Washington
The Columbia Basin and Grand Coulee Dam
However you ponder it, Grand Coulee Dam is big. It generates more electricity than any other facility in the United Sates, and it's the largest concrete structure in North America. Its hydraulic height of 380 feet is more than twice that of Niagara Falls, and the concrete used in its construction could have built an eight-foot-wide sidewalk around the world. Its reservoir, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, is more than a mile long, and its water irrigates more than one million acres of farmland.
The first signs we're approaching the dam area are the hundreds of power lines that soar up the cliff side from the valley below and the tall steel towers that support them. As I round a sharp turn on Washington's Hwy 174, the glossy surface of the Columbia River appears, and my eye naturally follows the waterway to the vast concrete wall that tames it. That this broad, swollen waterway should be here, in the middle of the parched badlands of eastern Washington seems incongruous; but for much of its journey from the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia to its confluence with the Snake, where it slices through the Cascade Range en route to the sea, the Columbia's copious flow roils in stark contrast to the still desert that surrounds it.
Grand Coulee, the city, was created to house the dam's construction and maintenance workers. On the west bank, Engineers' Town provided better accommodations for the engineers, project managers and administrative staff, while the construction workers lived in Mason City on the east bank. Both settlements are now part of the City of Coulee Dam. The dam area belongs to the Bureau of Reclamation, and the city of Grand Coulee is a mile or so south. Further along Banks Lake you have Electric City and Coulee City too. Confusing, eh?...
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