New Deal Big Dam Consensus - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 41

Chapter 3: New Deal Big Dam Consensus
The Savannah River valley's residents were accustomed to the river running dry or high in
the twentieth century. Augusta's factory managers had sent workers home for weeks after
shutting down waterpowered operations along the Augusta Canal during previous droughts.
And the 1908 flood alone had done enough damage to convince the city government to in-
vestigate, finance, and construct an eleven-mile levee to keep the Savannah River's almost
annual flood surges out of the city. 1 Given these past weather events, the prolonged, heavy,
and cold rains of September 1929 surely looked threatening to residents of Augusta, Geor-
gia, and Hamburg, South Carolina, who had lived through previous bouts of water anxiety
and insecurity.
The Savannah River valley's weather swung hard in the direction of rain after the New
South's 1925 drought of record. Over the course of thirty-six hours beginning September
26, 1929, nearly nine inches of rain fell across the upper Savannah River valley's land-
scape. Countless dry gullies, numerous small creeks, and broad rivers swelled beyond ca-
pacity and sent a forty-six-foot flood crest down the Savannah River's main channel. The
surge breeched the Augusta levee a few miles below the central business district. Water
flowed from the river through the levee and into the city and proceeded to back up the
city's stormwater drains and flood homes and businesses. The first flood wave passed, and
the rain briefly abated. Then, on October 1 and 2, a second storm—this time the tropical
remnants of a Category One Gulf of Mexico hurricane—moved across the southeast from
Apalachicola Bay in the Florida panhandle to Augusta and dropped another eight inches of
rain on an already saturated landscape. Unable to absorb any more water, the land shed the
deluge, and the Savannah River rose again to send a second, larger flood crest downstream
to the Augusta metro area. The Great Flood of 1929 plowed through the Piedmont, easily
surged over the low Stevens Creek and Augusta Canal dams, but broke the Augusta Canal's
bank above the city and washed away bridges intentionally loaded down with heavy freight
trains. Across the Savannah River from Augusta, William Gregg's antebellum-era Gran-
iteville and other Horse Creek valley mill dams broke loose and washed a handful of South
Carolina factory homes from their foundations. Despite fears that the sodden and comprom-
ised Augusta Levee might fail catastrophically during the flood, it did not. 2
The small town of Hamburg, immediately across the Savannah River, was not so lucky.
The South Carolina community had attempted to surpass its colonial-era Augusta neighbor
in an economic rivalry over which town would serve as the upper valley's commercial and