Countryside Conservatism and Conservation - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 112

biologists again linked soil-filled rivers with lack-luster Savannah River fisheries, and the
Public Health Service provided the Corps with malarial control suggestions for the Clarks
Hill project. 38 Municipal and industrial pollution was not yet a serious concern in the upper
Savannah River valley for these engineers, biologists, and public health officials. Water
quality, as fishermen and professionals illustrated at the time, had more to do with sediment
and muddy waters than with untreated municipal and industrial wastes. Put another way,
water pollution initially resulted from a long legacy of soil management choices made by
Savannah River valley farmers or forestry managers.
By the 1940s, serious water pollution began migrating upstream in southern watersheds
like the Savannah and Tennessee systems and was no longer simply a land management
problem. 39 Beginning in the late 1930s, TVA technicians discovered that the majority of the
upper Tennessee River valley's water pollution originated from textile, cellulose, and pa-
per manufacturing operations located upstream of Knoxville in the Holston, French Broad,
and Pigeon Rivers that stretched into southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina.
Some of these river stretches were, according to Daniel Schaffer, “so polluted that they
were unsuitable for industries requiring clean water, could not be used for swimming,” and
had reduced former trout streams to carp waters. By 1945, untreated industrial and mu-
nicipal waste flowed downstream, entered TVA reservoirs, and compelled officials to act.
However, the TVA's board of directors was hamstrung by a hostile anti-TVA and conser-
vative political climate that scrutinized any attempts to enlarge the institution's 1933 le-
gislative mandate. The New Deal institution was powerless to combat Sun Belt pollution,
since TVA regulations could not supersede state water quality regulations. Agency engin-
eers and consultants did provide data and technical details to state authorities, and they left
enforcement to state agents with authority to negotiate with municipal and industrial pol-
luters. 40 The Savannah River was an interstate river like the Tennessee, but valley residents
did not have a TVA-like actor that could work with Georgia and South Carolina to assess
and manage water pollution. The Corps was an unlikely enforcer.
Corps engineers were aware in the 1950s that communities and industries in the Trotters
Shoals reservoir area dumped untreated and partially treated waste into the Savannah River.
As an institution, the Corps was not responsible for enforcing the Federal Pollution Con-
trol Act (1956), but Corps engineers were not oblivious to water pollution. In the Corps'
Savannah River, Georgia Review Report , staff noted that while the dumping of wastes was
“currently permitted or tolerated” in the proposed reservoir's footprint, discharges in reser-
voirs elsewhere in the county resulted in public outcry, requests for federal assistance to
build treatment plants, and other “corrective measures” that might bring too much attention
to industrial operations. 41 To avoid this, the Corps recommended that state and local agen-
cies take the lead responsibility on water cleanup or face federal enforcement action. Under
the terms of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the first step in enforcement involved