Countryside Conservatism and Conservation - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 103

isting energy and leisure waterscape in the same valley. And after 1960, both organizations
reached the end of an era. When the Corps completed the Trotters Shoals dam (now known
as Richard B. Russell dam) in 1983 and Duke finished the Bad Creek Reservoir (1991),
there were no more worthy sites to build massive hydroelectric dams in the Savannah River
valley, the American South, or the United States. 2 The big dam era was over, and coun-
tryside conservationists and environmentalists could claim victories during a transition in
energy regimes.
If the New South capitalists and liberal New Dealers generated energy, managed water
quantity, and alleviated some valley residents' fears about uncontrolled flooding or slow-
moving drought, then both parties also invited a big dam backlash and encountered a new
water problem in the Sun Belt's waterways: poor water quality. When the Corps moved
forward on the Trotters Shoals multiple-purpose dam and reservoir, it was compelled to
address a new factor as the political landscape shifted under its boots and bulldozers. Be-
fore 1945, private and public engineers primarily approached water quantity as an envir-
onmental challenge when designing energy and water projects: How much water could
operators store to generate electricity, facilitate navigation, or mitigate flooding? In other
words, the traditional trio of benefits—hydroelectric generation, navigation, and flood con-
trol—promoted efficient water conservation and storage with only secondary concern for
water quality. Corps engineers had previously worked with state and federal agencies in
the Savannah River valley to manage fisheries and control malarial conditions at reservoir
sites, but promoting recreation and public health was not the same as protecting clean wa-
ter. 3
The story of Trotters Shoals was different from that of Clarks Hill and Hartwell in two
important ways. First, Congress dismantled the New Deal big dam consensus's traditional
trio of benefits. It officially authorized the Sun Belt scheme for power production and re-
creation and only incidentally for flood control or navigation. Second, the project was situ-
ated in the middle of the Savannah River valley's Piedmont Province, and the shoals were
among the last undammed twenty-eight miles of the Savannah River between the upper
reaches of the Clarks Hill reservoir and the base of the Hartwell dam. Industrialists, con-
servationists, and environmentalists all weighed in on the function, benefits, and value of
free-flowing water; they influenced the technocrats' final execution of the Trotters Shoals
dam along this unique stretch of river. Deliberation over the upper section of the Savan-
nah River's fate began as early as 1959, persisted until authorization in 1966, continued
before construction began in 1974, and was far from finished when the dam began gener-
ating electricity in 1985. This lengthy twenty-five-year political drama involved powerful
old and new actors who used equally archaic and novel arguments to lay claims on the Sa-
vannah River's water and energy resources.