Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 38

predictable. Playing the seasonal calendar, Duke employees typically filled artificial reser-
voirs during the wet season (January through May), kept them partially filled between May
and September because summer or tropical storms could produce flooding during this time
of year, and then drew the reservoirs down during the dry months between September and
January. 72 On average, the lowest period of rainfall occurred in the late summer and fall,
but “even this phase has no regularity,” engineers observed. Evidence illustrated that North
Carolina's early 1920s droughts were followed by “exceptionally heavy precipitation” and
“one of the greatest floods” in the Catawba River's recorded history in the late 1920s. 73
The private power company executives and engineers learned how fickle New South rivers
straitjacketed with multiple dams had become by 1930. Water managers had almost fully
engineered and controlled the region's rivers and thus white coal and energy production
without major disruption. But the companies' success also pointed to a new southern prob-
lem and to a pre-TVA New South that was anything but exceptional. The region—a hu-
mid place assumed to have plenty of rain—also had a water problem that required water
resource management and engineering on a scale once only associated with water-poor re-
gions like the arid American West. 74
Corporations financed interconnected hydraulic systems stretching from the Carolinas to
Florida and across Georgia to Mississippi, and they changed the New South's rivers and
economy in the process. The New South's private Super Power energy system and liberal
Giant Power alternative also influenced the shape and character of the region's well-docu-
mented New Deal water management institution: the TVA. Engineers from the Corps and
other federal entities could look across the New South at a vast privately organized and fin-
anced electricity generation and distribution system that was more than three decades old
when the TVA emerged in 1933 as a high-modernist solution for regional economic, social,
and environmental problems.
Once engineers from the TVA and Corps embarked on their own New Deal-style hydro-
electric projects in the 1930s, they solicited advice from academic experts, company exec-
utives, and professional engineers. 75 Rupert Vance was one of those advisors. On the eve
of the TVA's creation, Vance continued to promote hydroelectric possibilities in the region
while also acknowledging the inherent dangers of relying on a renewable energy source
to sustain urban-industrial development. Vance had identified water as a primary energy
source to fuel economic engines, but he was not ready to fully accept the prospect of wa-
ter scarcity or the “Piedmont crescent of industry's” shift to coal after 1925. In 1935, three
years after Vance published Human Geography , he collaborated on a study of the Catawba
River valley for the TVA. In one of the study's appendices, titled “The Consumption of
Coal in Relation to the Development of Hydroelectric Power in the Carolinas,” Vance con-
cluded that “the Carolinas had to develop hydro power or nothing” because “cheap power
attracts industries.” Vance acknowledged that a “tremendous consumption of coal in 1927”