New Deal Big Dam Consensus - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 45

produced turbid water and eliminated “many varieties of fish.” 10 Beyond recommendations
they could never enforce, such as improved land treatment programs to combat erosion
upstream of Augusta, the two men recommended structural engineering solutions: deeper
river channels below Augusta to move high water more quickly, protective levees around
the city, and flood control reservoirs in tributary streams above Augusta if such structures
could be economically justified. However, this 1890 federal risk assessment resulted in no
action from federal authorities. The Corps' leadership had historically refrained from using
levee and multiple-purpose technologies to manage flooding risks if such improvements
did not enhance navigation, serve national defense objectives, or meet basic cost-benefit
evaluations. Colonel Dan Kingman of the Savannah District engineers' office, like other
Corps colleagues, rejected multiple-purpose flood control options in the Savannah River
valley because they were “enormously expensive, and their effect uncertain.” 11 The 1908
flood did provide Augusta's leadership with enough justification to plan, finance, and com-
plete the city's levee by 1915. 12 This new structural flood control solution protected the
city in 1918 from a thirty-five foot flood surge and nearly failed catastrophically during the
great flood of 1929. But the city's levee institution successfully managed their only defined
risk: The Augusta Levee Commission maintained and reinforced a functional levee with
occasional congressional funding distributed through the Corps. 13 As such, Carter, King-
man, and other Corps engineers limited their own agency's activities to flood control and
navigation in the Savannah River valley well into the 1930s.
National disasters tend to influence institutional momentum. The Great Mississippi
Flood of 1927 helped clear the way for Congress to empower the Corps to move, on a na-
tional scale, beyond single-purpose navigational strategies and into the realm of multiple-
purpose navigation and flood control work. Under the terms of the Flood Control Act of
1928, Corps engineers assumed increased responsibility for planning, coordinating, con-
structing, and maintaining the Mississippi and Sacramento valleys' flood control apparat-
us; they replaced underfunded and poorly coordinated local levee commissions. 14 Colonel
Kingman, however, did not move as quickly into flood control in his valley as Corps en-
gineers did in other basins. Since Corps and Augusta operatives continued to focus only on
levee engineering along a single, isolated section of the Savannah River, the city's residents
and those with no levee protection continued to face threats associated with flooding and
drought because the Piedmont and the central Savannah River valley were not important
enough to the nation's economy or defense to warrant any federally organized, basinwide
improvement. 15 Major flooding in the Mississippi and other river valleys did not inspire
action among Corps officials in Georgia and South Carolina.
Corps and private sector engineers thought narrowly about their water projects before
1930. Until then, there were just a few comprehensive or multiple-purpose domestic and
international examples to study. 16 One was actually a Corps experiment: the Upper Mis-