Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
erally subsidized flood control eliminated a perception of risk—was eventually populated
with “executive homes” between the riverfront and the River Golf Club in the late 1990s.
Carpentersville—isolated on the hill over the river—was eventually surrounded by indus-
trial facilities and deteriorating strip malls. The powerful people who protected Augusta
and controlled the valley's water for industrial and commercial economies turned a hand-
some personal profit at the expense of others who sacrificed property, occupations, and
community. Solutions to Augusta's water insecurity benefited those who defined—and cre-
ated—the problem in the first place.
Interwar environmental and economic conditions challenged the simplistic divisions
between the uncoordinated private and public initiatives that managed some risks while
producing magnified problems in places like Hamburg. After Savannah River valley res-
idents gripped by the Great Depression reconsidered their drought and flood history, some
looked to the federal government for help building water conservation structures that could
manage complex rivers, urban-industrial energy demands, and the risks associated with
what were clearly recurring and new environmental conditions.
By the time the Great Depression ended with the nation's entrance into World War II in
1941, New Deal liberal water and energy programs bore fruit for the Corps and its crit-
ics in important ways. First, the Corps' leadership had been slowly amassing institutional
exposure to public works projects during the New Deal. For example, FDR appointed Col-
onel Francis Harrington to head the WPA in 1938. When former WPA head Harry Hopkins
transitioned to secretary of commerce, he observed that Harrington had the political advant-
age of appearing as an “'apolitical' army engineer.” Harrington, as a former Corps officer
and Panama Canal chief engineer (1924), also functioned as a foil that protected FDR and
was important for the Corps: The 308 Report forced Corps officers to engage with New
South executives, and the collaboration resulted in a federal blueprint for the Savannah
River's water and energy future. Before and during the New Deal era, Corps staff learned
how to organize public works projects and where these projects—including multiple-pur-
pose dams—might rise in the Savannah River valley's headwaters, tributaries, and main
stem. Finally, the Corps' work and experience with New Deal-era public works projects
had also provided valuable lessons for critics of regional planning, civil rights, and liberal-
ism. As Georgians, South Carolinians, and other Americans envisioned future energy and
water solutions, they recognized that artificial reservoirs had the capacity to produce risk
in a new social and environmental climate of postwar “rights-based liberalism.”
Southern Democrats and boosters capitalized on the Corps' Great Depression knowledge
and experience. They repackaged the New Deal big dam consensus's water and energy pro-
gram and set the stage—beginning at a place called Clarks Hill—for Sun Belt commer-
cialism. Solving the American South's water problems remained a predominantly private
