Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
rolls and spur job creation on both sides of the Savannah. Many of these same people were
probably not aware that their states were subsidizing industrial development by offering
liberal tax incentives to create a friendly business environment for companies like Duke
Power that were always quick to champion the invisible hand.
Duke enjoyed great support throughout South Carolina and in Georgia. According to op-
ponents of federal development on the Savannah River, additional publicly financed dams
and reservoirs wasted taxpayer dollars, eliminated potential industrial sites, and introduced
unequal competition in the energy sector. Governor Ernest F. Hollings was one of success-
ive South Carolina governors who opposed additional federal projects, and his “strenuous
opposition” in 1960 led the Corps to scrap their initial plans to build two dams on this
tion that had enthusiastically supported the older Clarks Hill and Hartwell programs in the
1940s and 1950s, quickly switched sides and favored Duke's private investment goals.
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Given these cheerleaders and formal positions, Duke's Middleton Shoals project appeared
well supported and pragmatic. However, the Corps' dam projects were not dead yet.
Not to be outdone by the South Carolina political establishment or Duke Power Com-
pany, Augusta's chamber of commerce executive Lester Moody and former Georgia state
senator Peyton Hawes capitalized on Senator Richard B. Russell's leadership to obtain a re-
study of the Savannah River between the Clarks Hill and Hartwell dams. Hawes (1903-90)
was a longtime political operative from Elbert County who served on the state supreme
court and, in the 1950s, as chair of the Georgia chamber of commerce. After the prompt
restudy, Corps investigators recommended “that the United States construct the Trotters
catch: The height of the Trotters Shoals dam threatened to flood part of Duke Power Com-
pany's Middleton Shoals steam plant site as well as other proposed industrial sites on the
Savannah's remaining undammed twenty-mile stretch of Piedmont river. The Corps' re-
study sparked an outcry from South Carolinians.
The Corps' Trotters Shoals and Duke's Middleton Shoals, however, were not exclusive
projects, according to many professionals. This fact made Duke's drive to terminate Trot-
ters Shoals all the more difficult. For the next three years, Duke Power Company and other
stakeholders in South Carolina and Georgia debated the merits and benefits of public en-
ergy at Trotters Shoals and corporate energy at Middleton Shoals. When Corps engineers
ultimately released their plans for Trotters Shoals in 1962, engineers dismantled the old
New Deal big dam consensus's trio of benefits connected to every preceding multiple-pur-
igation structure; Hartwell upstream and Clarks Hill downstream provided those benefits.
Instead, Corps technocrats sold Trotters Shoals's public energy and recreation benefits. As
