The Battle for the Columbia River
A Seattle attorney challenges a major dam project to secure the water rights of the Hanford-White Bluffs community.
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A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Attorney Carroll B. Graves of Seattle has filed a formal notice with the supervisor of hydraulics in Olympia to protect the interests of Hanford water-right owners. The move aims to ensure that any license granted for the proposed Priest Rapids dam includes strict protections for existing users. The protest argues that the old Hanford Irrigation and Power Company system, established around 1909, holds rights superior to new permit applications. The notice warns that the Washington Development Irrigation Company’s project threatens to render the existing irrigation infrastructure unusable. The water users, organized as the Hanford-White Bluffs Water Users Association, are now demanding a hearing to defend their access to the Columbia River.
“Under the water code the rights so acquired by actual use are superior to any rights thereafter sought through permit from your office.”
Water rights on the Columbia River remain a point of intense civic and legal friction in Washington today. This protest showcases the early-20th-century origins of the long-standing tension between large-scale industrial hydropower and established local agricultural interests.
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