Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Clarks Hill began producing energy in 1953, and all dam watchers waited to see what the
dam could do. But the project—including park planning, concession contracts, real estate
claims and leases, and domestic water supply allocation—was unfinished and contested
well into the 1960s. While the Corps eventually acquired all the land titles it needed, there
were numerous situations where individual and community support for a federally financed
Clarks Hill traveled a difficult path. From road and bridge relocations to public health and
malaria control to shoreline aesthetics and timber clearing, there was no shortage of grass-
roots resistance to the Corps. 80 Citizens successfully won concessions from the Corps to
alter road relocations that positively benefited communities affected by the new reservoir,
and they also influenced the Corps' timber operations to protect public health. These cit-
izens, not unlike their elected representatives, learned that while they were all “for it” dur-
ing the conceptual and planning stages, the Corps' execution of Clarks Hill was not simple,
clearly explained, or so easily acceptable.
Many of these issues were new and unanticipated by those who conceived of and who
supported the Clarks Hill development, and they illustrated the continuing and uninten-
ded management issues the Corps, elected officials, engineers, and residents had to con-
front in their new hydraulic waterscape. And even before Clarks Hill went online, the
Corps' next massive artificial Savannah River valley project moved from idea to reality.
The Hartwell dam and lake scheme, as recommended in the 1944 Flood Control Act, would
also face many of the same endorsements, trials, and rejections the Corps experienced with
the Clarks Hill project.
Just as there was no real politically Solid South, Sun Belt boosters found themselves
equally divided over the region's water and energy future. The Georgia Power Company
waged an unsuccessful political battle to win approval for a privately financed Clarks Hill
water and energy project and to avoid what their surrogates interpreted as the road to so-
cialism. The energy companies and their supporters consistently trumpeted the importance
of private enterprise and raised the specter of socialism, though this message was often in-
terpreted as flagrant hyperbole. For example, the Atlanta Journal editors surmised in 1947
that the Georgia Power Company was “not only fighting for something” it wanted but was
primarily “spearheading a campaign in behalf of the National Association of Electric Com-
panies” lobby and “to stop further development by government of the nation's river sys-
tems on the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority.” In the editors' opinion, the battle
over Clarks Hill was just one front on a nearly thirty-year-old war: “Shall there be any fur-
ther governmental developments like TVA, or shall TVA remain a sort of yardstick or ob-
ject lesson, and our river systems be developed for power production by private initiative
in the manner it deems best for production of profits?” 81 In the matter of Clarks Hill, many
supporters clearly sided with public power and rejected private power.
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