Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The TVA, authorized by Congress in 1933, enshrined the New Deal big dam consensus
in policy. The TVA's initial program demonstrated how several multiple-purpose dams
could reshape a river valley's physical, social, and economic environments with large
hydroelectric dams that incorporated navigation locks, generated electricity, controlled
floods, and regulated river levels to facilitate transportation. Between 1933 and 1945, TVA
engineers oversaw construction of one dozen massive dams and reservoirs to deliver the
trio of benefits. The TVA's greatest objective was manufacturing cheap electricity: Elec-
trified farms could embark on a new round of mechanization; electrification would make
decentralized industrialization possible and thus mitigate urban and labor woes; and elec-
tricity would make mass-produced fertilizer affordable for farmers. The regionally focused
programs would heal a poor land and rescue poor farmers from their gullied and unpro-
ductive lands. The TVA, however, was not just a regional planning or high-modernist suc-
tivated other federal agencies to reevaluate their missions and react accordingly. For ex-
ample, New Dealers from South Carolina eventually secured Public Works Administration
(PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) funding for the Santee-Cooper project
in 1935, a public power and flood control scheme that was also supposed to facilitate ship-
308 Report could have functioned as an important self-promotional piece, given the TVA's
and Santee-Cooper's practical examples of the New Deal big dam consensus in action. But
it did not.
Congress received Major C. Garlington's official 308 Report,
Report on the Savannah
,
in 1935 as the TVA's first four multiple-purpose dam projects moved through planning
and striking conclusions as the Great Depression deepened. The report provided an extens-
ive flood history, but there was little discussion about drought history. On flood control,
the Corps continued to view the Augusta Levee Commission's locally managed eleven-
lumped hydropower and navigation together in the report. The Corps engineers simply re-
capped what Georgia Power executives had conveyed in March 1933: “Certain power de-
velopments may be economically justified when and if a suitable market” emerged, but
until then hydroelectric dams did not make economic sense or deserve federal investment.
Then the report identified eighteen potential multiple-purpose dam sites throughout the Sa-
vannah River basin above Augusta along the Savannah itself and in its tributaries. The
Corps also acknowledged that a coordinated “power and navigation” project at Clarks Hill
might be organized by an unnamed private power company and the federal government at
some point in the future. This suggestion was not radical, and the Alabama Power Com-
pany had proposed a similar arrangement during the Great War and the Muscle Shoals con-
