Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
utives and Hartwell opponents alike to begin merging their concerns and to ask big ques-
tions: If private enterprise and technology outperformed public hydropower projects, then
why did the federal government continue to promote energy-inefficient big dam projects
that symbolized a colossal waste of taxpayer money and an affront to water and property
rights? A backlash that began with Clemson's fear of mudflats, Reid's states' rights argu-
ment, and now Duke's cost-benefit analysis began to coalesce.
The Truth about “Hartwell”
and other individual voices represented a new conservative
vanguard that articulated opposition to the Hartwell development, the lingering New Deal
big dam consensus, and postwar liberalism. Even when Georgia and South Carolina del-
egates championed federal water projects as solutions for water problems, citizen support
for public energy developments did not come very easily. Not all boosters shared the same
vision of shaping the region's economic future through water and energy endeavors like
Hartwell. Civic bodies such as the Hartwell Steering Committee had enjoyed cross-border
alliances in the past. However, and over the course of the next thirty years, South Carolini-
ans increasingly became spoilers, and they defended private enterprise while rejecting Ge-
orgians' vision of public energy and federal public works projects in the Savannah River
basin. Property rights, water rights, and fiscal issues continued to dog Corps and elected
officials. But did other solutions exist to resolve the Southeast's water insecurity?
Hartwell critics latched onto flood control and water supply solutions in a competing
federal agency's neopopulist programs that embraced low-tech options. Taxpayers, such as
S. Maner Martin, feared government expansion and bristled at spending public funds on a
Watson, who considered herself among the “reputable engineers” and “thinking voters,”
opposed Hartwell because it represented “a major step toward Socialism and an extravag-
ant waste of the taxpayers' money.” Watson admitted her opposition to the project was
grounded in self-interest because she did not want “the beauty and peace of our landscape
proposed Hartwell reservoir a “fish pond” sounds like a misrepresentation of a body of
water that would eventually inundate more than 50,000 acres and produce more than fish.
But Martin's and Watson's choice of words about the massive Sun Belt working reservoir
tapped into a larger discussion about the federal government's role in resolving national
water problems and what water storage and irrigation tools to use.
The 1950s drought was a turning point in the American South. As the lack of rain and
competing demands exacerbated water scarcity in Georgia, some farmers turned to farm
ponds to survive the water crunch in 1954. As journalist Bill Allen said in 1953, if mid-
western states could claim the title of the “Land o' Lakes” then Georgia was the “Paradise
o' Ponds.” By one account, Georgia could claim 12,000 farm and fish ponds that inund-
