Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
former Tugaloo river valley—one of many short stops on a 300-plus-mile journey to the
Atlantic Ocean via the Savannah River.
A bird's-eye view of the southern Appalachian headwaters clearly illustrates how the
Chattooga River differs from other Blue Ridge watersheds. To the south and west, the
Georgia Power Company effectively transformed the Tallulah and Tugaloo Rivers into
one large water-storage pond between 1913 and 1927 to supply Atlanta with electricity to
power a New South. On the west and north, the headwaters of the Tennessee River feed the
Gulf of Mexico on the other side of the Eastern Continental Divide. There, Alcoa, the Ten-
nessee Electric Power Company, and other New South energy corporations dammed the
Tennessee River system's southern Appalachian tributaries—the Tuckasegee, Nantahala,
Little Tennessee, and Hiwassee Rivers—extensively before 1930. The more well-known
Tennessee Valley Authority assumed control of that river and tributaries after 1933 and ini-
tiated a comprehensive plan to build more than twenty multiple-purpose dams to provide
agricultural, navigational, flood control, and hydroelectric benefits for purportedly demo-
cratic and decentralized economic development in one area of a larger region labeled the
“nation's no. 1 economic problem” by New Dealers.
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Turning east from the bird's-eye vantage point back to the Savannah River's headwaters,
Duke Power Company began building Sun Belt hydroelectric dams in Appalachian valleys
to create Lakes Jocassee and Keowee by drowning South Carolina's Whitewater, Toxaway,
and Keowee Rivers in the late 1960s. To the south, and farther down the Savannah River
valley itself, the Corps' three massive hydroelectric installations appear. Engineers built
these Sun Belt projects above the river's fall line between 1945 and 1985. In contrast to
these adjacent watersheds, the fifty-mile Chattooga River flowed wild and free as an an-
omaly, undeveloped by corporate or federal energy institutions. The Chattooga remained a
river surrounded by a sea of reservoirs.
The Chattooga may have been alone in the Southeast, but wild rivers across the country
were equally threatened by agricultural and energy interests. Environmental historians have
long considered the battles over Hells Canyon and Echo Park as critical national battle-
grounds. At both locations—in Idaho and in Colorado (see Chapter 5)—the Army Corps
of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation planned large multiple-purpose dams for the
Snake River and the Green River in the 1950s. Organized protest that defeated both projects
contributed to the rise of postwar environmentalism, and the skills opponents marshaled
“carried over into subsequent wilderness and water controversies,” according to Mark Har-
vey.
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The wild and scenic river system was one such example. In the late 1950s, brothers John
C. and Frank E. Craighead Jr. formalized a river classification system that directly influen-
ced the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968). They were avid outdoorsmen, natural-
ists, and wildlife biologists best known for their lengthy grizzly bear study in Yellowstone
