Dominy’s Bureau regarded the operation as a “success,” failing utterly to recognize the public relations catastrophe into which it had happily stepped. Even Imperial Valley farmers, who had so much water to waste that some of them applied ten or twelve feet per year to their crops, were opposed to the dredging because they liked to shoot ducks. Ben Avery, a widely read outdoor columnist for the Arizona Republic—a newspaper never known to oppose water development unless it was California’s—adopted Topock Marsh as his personal crusade and made a point of savaging the Bureau several times a year.
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