Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
like Muscle Shoals “controversial” well into the 1920s because of a national debate about
public versus private energy production and the financial costs. While the Corps' resident
Tennessee Valley engineers thought massive dams could serve many beneficial purposes,
not until the 1930s did officers in Washington, D.C., recommend that Congress seriously
consider federal multiple-purpose projects. 33
Other Tennessee River valley energy firms and transnational corporations manipulated
the state's waterways to generate energy and consolidate economic power in the urban-in-
dustrial New South. Private corporations, including the Aluminum Company of America
(Alcoa), built at least twenty-one hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River's tributaries
between 1905 and 1928. 34 The Great Depression derailed all companies' plans to fully
develop southeastern rivers and disrupted private water storage and management projects
throughout the New South. However, Tennessee and other energy companies were not the
only organizations to deploy transnational technologies and consolidate corporate power
throughout Rupert Vance's “Piedmont crescent of industry” in the 1920s.
One last example illustrates the scope of corporate power and the scale of environmental
manipulation in the New South before the genesis of the TVA. The Georgia Power Com-
pany's engineers and laborers captured the Savannah River's headwaters and transformed
the Tallulah and Tugaloo Rivers into a series of artificial lakes behind multiple dams to
generate electricity for transmission to faraway consumers. During the Tallulah-Tugaloo
project's formative stage in the early 1900s, one writer noted that the company planned
a “vast network of interconnected hydroelectric power systems … along lines similar to
those of the” Duke Power Company. 35 Georgia Power's ventures on rivers throughout the
state were like other companies' projects in Tennessee and throughout the Carolinas: Geor-
gia Power's schemes required external capital and transnational engineering expertise, and
the company's choices further solidified the energy-water nexus in the region.
Big dams that diverted water into long pipelines and powerhouses were not exceptional,
but the scale of Georgia Power's project was unique for the Southeast. 36 Starting in 1910,
Georgia Power completed six dams and filled six reservoirs along the Tallulah and Tuga-
loo Rivers in the upper Savannah River basin. When the company completed the last dam
and reservoir project in 1927, Georgia Power's Tallulah-Tugaloo system constituted “the
most completely developed continuous stretch of river in the United States,” according to
company historian Wade H. Wright. 37 The corporation's artificial reservoirs and hydroelec-
tric plants worked together to produce electricity on demand, as one company executive
claimed, for “many thousands” of industrial employees and for more than sixty-five Geor-
gia municipalities. 38 More than 800 miles of transmission lines strung throughout Georgia
connected the Tallulah-Tugaloo hydraulic system's falling water to these consumers. To see
a map of this hydroelectric machine, or to see it from the air, was to peer into the future
of another southeastern river valley just a few miles away on the other side of the Eastern
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