Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 86

To the boosters' advantage, the Savannah River valley did accrue strategic capital when
it became a part of America's modified Cold War “garrison state.” 22 After the Soviet Union
tested its first fission atomic weapon in 1949, National Security Council Resolution 68
outlined the U.S. military response and included a call for a new generation of nucle-
ar weapons: hydrogen bombs. By the end of 1950, the federal government had selected
a site twenty miles east of Augusta in Aiken and Barnwell Counties (S.C.) and contrac-
ted Delaware-based E. I. Du Pont De Nemours & Company to operate a new nuclear fa-
cility—the Savannah River Site (SRS)—to produce tritium for the next wave of nuclear
weapons. 23
The Hartwell boosters and the Corps grafted the SRS project into their promotional ma-
terials to fortify their cause in the halls of Congress while inadvertently sowing confu-
sion. 24 South Carolina's and Georgia's Democratic leadership initially connected Hartwell
and the SRS defense facility in the early 1950s based on projected regional electrical
needs. 25 The real connection between the two facilities, they soon learned from the AEC,
was not electrical supply but Hartwell's ability to help regulate the Savannah River's flow
of water into—and ultimately out of—Clarks Hill's reservoir. As one AEC spokesperson
explained to South Carolina senator J. Strom Thurmond (D), Corps engineers' combined
operations at Hartwell and Clarks Hill would ensure water releases at a minimum flow of
5,300 cubic feet per second. These regular releases of cold water were necessary for the
SRS's water withdrawals and critical nuclear reactor operations. 26 These details mattered,
but Sun Belt boosters and politicians ultimately branded Hartwell as a national defense
project that also promised commercial development throughout the central Savannah River
valley's much larger hydraulic waterscape.
Another group of Sun Belt movers and shakers lined up in support of Hartwell's recre-
ational promise. This new crew was not interested in the traditional trio of benefits or na-
tional defense; they wanted to invest in property adjacent to the Sun Belt's newest working
reservoir. As Corps real estate agents began acquiring and condemning land from hundreds
of property owners already living within the Hartwell dam and reservoir area in 1958, a
small band of professionals and contractors eager to carve a new lakeside community from
old farmland began corresponding with South Carolina's Senator Thurmond. This new pro-
dam crowd inquired about specific shoreline land management policies, such as property
owners' rights to access the public reservoir from private land. 27
It is important to point out at this juncture that the Corps incorporated a buffer or collar of
land between the reservoir's high-water line and adjacent private property lines for nearly
every project all over the country. Working reservoirs—public and private—maintain these
buffers primarily to protect water quality and to keep dirt from running off, accumulating in
the reservoir, and compromising water storage capacity. 28 The distance between these lines
or the amount of land contained within the buffer and collar could be a few hundred feet or