Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West Page 7
Although tens of thousands of people go to Laughlin, Nevada, to gamble and to stay in cheap casino-hotels, very few link the little gambling town on the Colorado River with the remote section of northern Arizona called Black Mesa. I arrived in Laughlin from the opposite direction, following the slurry pipeline from Black Mesa and traveling some three hundred miles across northern Arizona to the tip of Nevada. Laughlin as a townsite didn’t exist before the Mohave Generating Station. Consequently, a revised history makes the power plant a central player in the town’s miracle growth.
*Barry Goldwater left the Senate in 1964, when he ran for president. He was out of office for four years until 1969, when he won a special election to replace the retiring Carl Hayden, and then he won again in the regular election of 1974. Although he lost the seniority that consecutive service would have earned him, by the time he retired in 1986 after five terms, he was chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. His replacement in 1987 was John McCain.
PART II
CHAPTER 4
FOUNDING MYTHS: LAUGHLIN, NEVADA
The founding myth of Las Vegas is that it is a place for a fresh start, a place in the sun where a person is not burdened by failures in other locales. Even today, the history of Las Vegas rests on the story of an ordinary person with great gambler’s luck who hits the jackpot and changes his or her life. It is mostly a man’s fantasy and frequently includes “a vision in the desert,” similar to the Hollywood version of Bugsy Siegel seeing the Flamingo shimmering in the desert like a religious epiphany. A lot of unexplored truths lie beneath this myth of self-reliance and individual initiative on the route to riches and empire.
Laughlin, Nevada, is a gambling enclave some ninety miles south of Las Vegas on the Colorado River. It is named for Don Laughlin, who moved to Las Vegas from Michigan in 1954 when he was twenty-one, a time when Las Vegas was still getting started as a gambling capital. Reno was the big city in Nevada. Most of the casinos—Binion’s, the Flamingo, and the Desert Inn—were fronted by men without police records but owned by syndicates of known gangsters from other cities. Their histories in Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Havana were well known to the FBI and the Senate Committee on Organized Crime, which held hearings in Las Vegas in 1950. But as Moe Dalitz was reputed to have pointed out to the committee members, Las Vegas was attractive to Mob bosses because “Nevada was the only place in America where gambling was legal. Who else knew how to run games except gangsters?”
Don Laughlin worked as a bartender and dealer in different clubs around Vegas and managed to save enough money to buy a stake in the 101 Club, a small bar in North Las Vegas. The 101 Club enabled him to get a gambling license that was good throughout Clark County. Then in 1966, at the age of thirty-three, for reasons never really explained, he took a huge gamble on an unknown property in a nameless location in the Mohave Desert. He sold most of his stake in the 101 Club and bought a motel, bait shop, and six acres of land on an empty patch of Nevada desert, sixty miles south of Hoover Dam on the banks of the Colorado River.
It was at this bend in the river, located in the eye of the needle where the point of Nevada wedges into Arizona and California, that Don Laughlin staked his improbable future. Owned by the US government and managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the area was known mainly as a locale for the highest recorded temperatures in the entire West—a record that it still holds. Laughlin’s only attractive natural topographic feature is the Colorado River, flowing flat and oily between two desert bluffs. At this point the river has turned due south, is sixty miles out of canyon country, and is following gravity down into Mexico. For the next four hundred miles, it forms the serpentine border between Arizona and California. When the river arrives at its delta in the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California), it is so used up by multiple irrigation projects upstream that what people see as river is actually the ocean filling up tidal flats. No water is left in the Colorado River. Even when there was water, farmers in Mexico found the saline content so high that their portion of the river was unusable for agriculture. The governments of Mexico and the United States negotiated an international treaty, ensuring Mexico its share of desalinated water through construction of a dam and a desalinization plant, first signed in 1944 and amended in 2012.
Why would anyone spend $250,000 on an empty piece of desert only five hundred feet above sea level with recorded temperatures of 125 degrees? The single known economic activity took place on the Arizona side of the river at Bullhead City, where recreational fishermen came to fish for bass. The town’s name came either from a rock formation called Bull Head Rock or fishermen who thought they were fishing for bullhead trout. The Nevada side remained nameless.
In 1967 the US Postal Service decided to name the place “Laughlin” after Don Laughlin himself. Laughlin was expanding his property. He put slot machines in his restaurant (his Clark County gaming license was valid), enlarged the motel, and seemingly in no time had a dependable clientele swarming in from California and Arizona. Don Laughlin became a multimillionaire and the founder of his own gambling empire. He embodied the essence of the Vegas dream. That is the official version of the story.
Another version might ask other questions. Why did this spot in the desert need a post office?
The new town of Laughlin—ninety miles by road from Las Vegas, sixty miles by river—needed a post office because a giant construction project was already under way by 1966. Even before construction began, even before Don Laughlin bought his six acres, even before the post office was looking for a name, surveyors were measuring the site where a new 1,500-megawatt electricity generating plant was to be located; construction engineers were developing the staging area where equipment would be unloaded; roads were being upgraded to transport men and equipment to the site a hundred feet above the river. This coal-fired plant, soon to be called the Mohave Generating Station, was to be the destination for the first coal-slurry pipeline in the United States, a template for a coal delivery system that could revolutionize the market. Coal was the source of air-conditioning and electricity to power the mushrooming growth of the desert cities of the Southwest. The owners of the new generating station were the utilities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. The operating utility was Southern California Edison. Like the rest of America in 1966, these cities got more than 60 percent of their electricity from coal, even though many people erroneously thought that coal had disappeared with the Industrial Revolution.
In 1950 Las Vegas had a population of 25,000 people and was mainly known for quickie divorces, brothels, bars, and gambling. Slowly and then quickly, it started to grow. By 1960 it had 65,000 people, in 1970 125,000. A visitor flying in by plane saw huge parcels of desert land bulldozed into geometric designs that would eventually become roadways and housing plots within gated communities. The land had been bought and subdivided and was awaiting the extension of city services such as water, sewer, and electrical lines. Today people will tell you when they came to Las Vegas, the city ended at Eastern Avenue on the east and Decatur on the west. Those roads are midcity today. Three of the fastest-growing cities in the country were Henderson, North Las Vegas, and Boulder City, all outside of Las Vegas. The same growth pattern was true in Phoenix, where Peoria and Chandler were booming. Real estate developer Del Webb, who operated in both cities, did not advertise his new retirement communities by saying, “Come Live in the Desert.” Instead, he said, “Come Live in the Sun.” The new westerners, who bought model homes in new developments of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand houses, wanted lawns and golf courses and green vegetation like they had in the East and Midwest. The huge development of Summerlin on the western side of Las Vegas, where houses backed up the slopes of the mountains, had five separate developers creating communities with preplanned hospitals and schools and swimming pools and golf courses. The developers targeted buyers in communities around Los Angeles, where the average home price had pushed people either o
ut of the housing market entirely or into three-hour commutes to work. Where were the resources to come from to make this growth possible? The Mohave plant was the first of what some people called “the new Hoover Dam,” four coal-fired plants and two nuclear that were to provide the water and electricity for the selling of the New West.
Despite the antigovernment rhetoric, millions of dollars of federal money were being fed into the payrolls of the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco to build the new generating station as well as to design the new technology of a coal slurry–pipeline delivery system. The unique aspect of this particular generating station was that it would be the first plant in the world to be supplied by slurried coal.
Railroads are the most expensive aspect of supplying a generating station. As I learned from the film I watched at the Black Mesa Pipeline office, the new plant in Laughlin would not require construction of a dedicated railroad with hundred-car trains delivering coal twenty-four hours a day. (A 1,500-megawatt coal plant burns a freight car of coal every ten minutes.) The Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline was the first in the world to demonstrate that a generating station could run from slurried coal. The great novelty of the plant in Laughlin was the technology of turning hard coal into liquid slurry and delivering it through a pipeline, making coal potentially as fluid and transportable as oil.
Although the pipeline was owned by Williams Technologies of Tulsa, Oklahoma, it had been designed and built by Bechtel with the help of a $3 billion research and development grant from the federal government, helped along by Peter Flanigan, an economics adviser in the Nixon White House. The film’s narrator explained that the cost of building a 300-mile railroad was prohibitive. But a pipeline was plausible even though it would be on Indian lands. “The final decision was theirs,” Morgan Greenwood, the president of Williams Technology, said portentously. “Indians too want the better things of life.”
The narrator went on to explain that the slurry-pipeline water “would have no effect on the Indians’ water supply” because the slurry-line water came from two-thousand-foot wells “encased in steel.” The Indians dug “shallow wells.” The pipeline company “paid the highest royalties the Indians ever received.” “Indian applicants would get jobs.” In fact, the jobs were not so plentiful because strip mining is machinery intensive. A rule of thumb is that 105 full-time miners in the field can strip-mine 2 million tons a year. (The Kayenta Mine on Black Mesa has a 430-man workforce extracting 7.8 million tons of coal a year.)
After the film I went outside to see the slurry pipeline in operation. A conveyor belt carried raw coal to the processing center, where it was crushed into egg-size pieces no larger than two inches. Then it was weighed. The coal royalty paid to the Navajo and Hopi was based on the weight of the coal. Operating on the same principle as the home garbage disposal, the coal was fed into a giant mixmaster (not its technical name), pulverized, mixed with water, and then washed through a pipe, in this case a 273-mile pipeline helped along by five pumping stations.
Lowell Hinkins, an operator at the slurry-pipeline office who described himself as an “old farm boy from Wisconsin” but who “had worked for mining companies all over the world,” explained to me that the mix of water and coal had to be carefully calibrated so that the coal particles stayed suspended. If the water flow was too slow, the solids settled to the bottom of the pipe and caused the system to clog; if it went too fast, it caused abrasion to the pipe. Although the pipeline was buried, the route follows Route 40 to Flagstaff, Williams, Seligman, Kingman, and then across Davis Dam into Laughlin.
I asked Hinkins about the number of jobs. He said that “the three top people are Anglo. We have two Hopi, thirty-one Navajo. We receive about three thousand applications a year. We’re trained to understand the Indian culture.” He showed me the certificate from a course he had to taken in Page on “cross-cultural communications.”
Once arriving in Laughlin, Nevada, the coal slurry was dewatered, dried out by means of a centrifuge, and the water sent to huge evaporation ponds. The Mohave Generating Station and the Black Mesa Pipeline were the first coal slurry–pipeline system built in the United States and the first generating station in the world to be run by dewatered coal. Desolate Laughlin was the hub for a revolutionary new coal technology that utility engineers from around the globe would come to visit. Bechtel Corporation was developing and promoting slurry-pipeline systems to countries with large coal reserves.
Similar to the industry descriptions of “clean coal” technologies today (as of 2013 no successful clean coal plant has been built), the Mohave plant and slurry pipeline promised a new era in coal economics and cheap electricity. The federal grant in process in Washington was key to funding the research and development costs of the slurry pipeline and the plant it would run, both of which were already under construction.
The Bechtel Corporation advertised its role in the project—“1500 Megawatts for the Southwest” ran the headline in its in-house magazine, Bechtel Briefs—over a drawing of the Mohave plant. The plant was identical to two new 750-megawatt units Bechtel was already building at the Four Corners plant in Farmington, New Mexico, making the capacity of that plant 2,250 megawatts. In other words, the activity in Laughlin was not a secret.
The plant’s construction required massive equipment and hundreds of workers—drillers, explosive experts, electricians, plumbers, concrete technicians, utility engineers—going to work every day in Laughlin and getting a paycheck every week. Many of them lived across the river in Bullhead City, but as soon as construction started they moved to trailers at the site. In no time Don Laughlin’s restaurant and motel and slot machines were filled with construction workers and utility engineers engaged in the billion-dollar project. It might be less colorful, but far more accurate, to say that Don Laughlin made a smart investment based on good information rather than a stroke of gambler’s luck and a magical “vision in the desert.”
The best place to gauge the massive size taken up by the Mohave Generating Station is in the main restaurant of the faux Mississippi steamboat known as the Colorado Belle. Designed to look like a riverboat pilot room, the restaurant is dominated by a huge backlit chart of the Colorado River that shows the Mohave power plant and its two giant holding ponds taking up more land than the town of Laughlin itself. The plant itself is at least twice the width of the river and, when combined with the holding ponds, larger than the downtown.
The Mohave was the first of four new coal-fired plants planned and built for the unpopulated interior West between 1967 and 1975. Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas needed the electricity infrastructure to power the Sunbelt Boom. The electricity lit up the elaborate neon signs of Las Vegas, powered air conditioners in Los Angeles, and pumped water into Phoenix. Although some people called this massive infrastructure the “new Hoover Dam,” it was quite unlike Hoover Dam in that it was not focused in one easy-to-understand location. The generating stations were strung out along the Colorado River and into the unpopulated interior of the Colorado Plateau. And the coal for all them was to be strip-mined on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. (The coal for the Four Corners plant was being mined on another section of the Navajo reservation by Utah International, then a subsidiary of General Electric, soon to become a subsidiary of the Australian mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary.) The two new units for the Four Corners generating station in Farmington, New Mexico, were the first to be built; the Mohave plant in Laughlin was the second; the third was the Navajo Generation Station in Page; and the Coronado Generating Station in St. Johns, Arizona, was the fourth. All were built by Bechtel. A fifth was planned for southern Utah, called the Kaiparowitz project, but Utah citizens were able to defeat the plant and the slurry pipeline on the evidence of its long-term damaging effects on groundwater in a desert climate.
By the time the Navajo Generating Station went on line in 1974, Don Laughlin’s bait shop and motel had morphed into the fourteen-story Riverside hotel-casino, and he was a multimillionaire. Harrah’s
and Bally’s and an ersatz Mississippi riverboat casino had followed him to this remote spot in the Mohave Desert. Steve Wynn, not yet known as the Medici prince of Las Vegas, bought the Nevada Club (now the Golden Nugget) in Laughlin. Three Las Vegas brand names came together when the Hilton chain opened the Laughlin Flamingo Hilton in 1990. In the wake of the big casino-hotels came the hunter-gatherers of real estate capitalism—condo developers and retirement-community entrepreneurs. To distract from the stark conditions of desert living, they promoted water taxis, new restaurants, big-name entertainment, a river walk, golf courses, retirement communities, and, of course, Laughlin’s unique location at the edge of a mighty flowing river in the middle of the desert. “Tee off by the Colorado River in the Nevada desert,” advertises one golf course.
Laughlin, however, is noted for four things: its stupefying heat (113 degrees when I was there in early June, and it didn’t cool down at night), picture windows in the casinos (Las Vegas casinos are built without windows so a visitor loses track of time), notoriously cheap hotel rooms ($23 for my room at the Edgewater, $39 at Harrah’s), and the visible failure of Nevada’s real estate capitalism. A series of films on YouTube takes the viewer on a ride around deserted real estate developments in Laughlin and Las Vegas—houses built, grounds landscaped, no one there.
It is probably a safe bet to say that few Las Vegas or Laughlin visitors have ever been to Black Mesa. But if a visitor followed the coal-slurry pipeline backward from Laughlin 273 miles to its source, as I did, she would find herself at a remote spot in northern Arizona off Highway 160, some twenty miles west of Kayenta, Arizona. Travel another 10 miles down Route 41, and you pass an airfield on your left before arriving at Peabody Coal’s Black Mesa office, where you are asked to watch a film on mine safety before being given a hard hat to wear on your way to the Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline office. If it is winter, you will see cone-shaped piles of coal the height of a three-story building covered with a dusting of grayish snow, an overhead conveyor belt depositing coal chunks into a giant mixmaster, and a huge water tank where, somewhere out of view, pumps are sucking water out of the Navajo aquifer, the sole source of water for both the Hopi and the Navajo.