Floyd E. Dominy, a federal water official with an outsize personality who shepherded some of the West’s last big dam projects to completion, has died. He was 100.
Dominy, who served as commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969 under four presidents, died April 20 at his farm in Boyce, Va.
Politically connected, smart and determined, Dominy loomed large in Western water circles. He believed that a good river was a dammed river and ran the bureau before landmark environmental laws made it harder to push through projects with little regard for ecological consequences.
“He relished the power he had and used it to do what he thought was the right thing to do for the country,” said Roger Patterson, a former reclamation official who is now assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “He was a legend.”
Dominy’s tenure is best known for the opening of Glen Canyon Dam, which plugged the Colorado River and flooded a glorious canyon landscape, creating Lake Powell. Conservationists considered the dam one of the worst environmental sins in the West. Dominy called it his “crowning jewel.”
“He was a man who was promoting reclamation at a time of big dam building, when people didn’t understand the environmental cost of big dams nor the spiritual and societal value of free-f lowing rivers,” said Bruce Hamilton, deputy executive director of the Sierra Club.
Dominy was born Dec. 24, 1909, on a Nebraska homestead and grew up under the harsh rhythms of subsistence farming, helping his family scratch a living out of 160 acres.
He graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in agricultural economics. In 1934, amid drought and the Great Depression, he was appointed agricultural agent in Campbell County, Wyo. It was there that he embarked on his dam-building career, working with local ranchers to erect small dams on ephemeral creeks to catch storm water for their scrawny cattle. He joined the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s.
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