-------- Original Message --------
Subject: LS: Unfinished Dam Demolished in Tennessee Valley
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 15:18:50 -0800
From: Patrick McCully <patrick@irn.org>
To: irn-wcd@igc.org

BAD FEELINGS LINGER AS UNFINISHED TVA DAM IS DEMOLISHED
By MARTA W. ALDRICH
COLUMBIA, Tenn. (October 10, 1999 10:19 a.m. EDT
http://www.nandotimes.com)

- On a basin along the Duck River, bulldozer-size hydraulic hammers chip
away each weekday at 26,000 cubic yards of concrete that for 16 years
stood as a monument to failure. The Tennessee Valley Authority's unfinished
Columbia Dam will never hold back a drop of water. It is being
demolished.

For hundreds of people who saw their families uprooted and homesteads
bulldozed to make way for the project in the 1970s, a bitter taste
returned in May with the announcement that the dam would come down.
"To think that it was all for nothing, it's sad," said Patricia West,
73, whose 156-acre farm was among 12,800 acres acquired. "My heart is still
broke."

TVA spent about $83 million on the dam between 1969 and 1983, when the
project was halted over environmental concerns. The dam's concrete
portion was more than 90 percent complete and the project as a whole was nearly
half done.

Except for occasional vandals and repellers, the site was mostly
abandoned until June 1, when demolition crews arrived.

TVA cited safety among its reasons for the demolition - people fall off
dams from time to time - but the price tag also had become prohibitive.
Construction and land expenses have risen steeply since 1967, from a
projected $50 million then to $200 million.

Demolition should be finished by January.

"Some people were hoping for one big boom - big puff of smoke and all,"
said TVA project manager Dan Ferry. "But that would have rattled houses
and caused too intense a shock."

Instead, each weekday from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., hydraulic hammers flake
off 15 cubic yards an hour. The faithful "peck, peck, peck" can be heard
several miles away.

"It's like mowing your grass," Ferry said. "You just have to start in
one corner and keep mowing until it's done."

TVA will have spent $2.4 million once the dam is dismantled and broken
rock used to reshape the basin to resemble the original site. Ferry said it's
an expense of conscience.

"We're trying to leave this land in as good a shape as we can. We've
irritated people enough around here already," he said.

TVA, created in 1933 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
New Deal, built a string of power-producing and flood-controlling dams in
Tennessee and Kentucky through the 1940s. For the most part, they
transformed the character of the flood-prone Tennessee Valley and made
large-scale economic growth possible.

Less well-received were TVA tributary dams like Columbia that came in
the 1960s and 1970s. Their goals weren't electricity production but local
economic development, drinking water and recreation.

Local business leaders envisioned the Columbia Dam as a precursor to
industrial growth for the region. They formed the Upper Duck River
Development Association in 1964 and lobbied U.S. Rep. Joe L. Evins,
D-Tenn.

He was chairman of the powerful House subcommittee on public works and a
friend of Columbia banker and dam proponent Lon MacFarland.
Evins secured the first funding in 1969 for a two-dam project on the
Duck River that would begin with Normandy Dam and finish with the more
expensive Columbia Dam 100 river miles to the north.

"He just thought it would be a great benefit to that area," recalled
Robert Moore Jr., who worked for the late congressman in the early 1960s.
Attorney Frank Fly, who represented environmental groups and farmers
opposing the project, saw it as pork-barrel politics at its worst.

"The definition of pork barrel is the taking of money from the masses
and giving it to a few in the name of a government project. The few who were
going to get money at Columbia were in favor of this project. Everyone
else was against it," he said.

Fly believes TVA was dragged unwillingly into the job. The agency
conducted three feasibility studies, in 1933, 1951 and 1966, that recommended
against building the dam.

However, the last study was revised and presented a more favorable case,
showing $1.20 of benefits for every $1 of cost and setting the stage for
federal funding.

TVA quickly began acquiring the flat, rocky land on the outskirts of
Columbia, 40 miles south of Nashville, where farms and homes dotted
rural communities with names like Blue Springs, Scribners Mill and Fountain
Heights.

Buddy Derryberry, whose parents ran a country store in Fountain Heights,
described residents as "salt-of-the-earth-type people."

"They didn't meddle in other people's business. But if someone was sick,
they'd go help take care of them," he said.

Few had the resources or know-how, however, to fight the giant federal
utility when TVA officials ordered them to sell or face condemnation.

"They'd say, 'If you don't like what we give you, you can hire a
lawyer,"' recalled Derryberry, whose parents' store was bought in the land rush.
"After that, the elderly folks were never the same. It destroyed them. I
remember seeing 80-year-old people just sit down and cry like a baby
'cause they didn't want to leave home."

Environmentalists pounced on the Columbia project, which would impound
the Duck River on relatively level land. They said the dam would turn the
tributary into a murky, algae-filled lake.

They mailed small bottles of smelly green water to Tennessee's
congressional delegation, took the matter to federal court and managed
to get several construction delays, raising the ire of local supporters who
saw the environmentalists - mainly out-of-state groups - as interfering
in local matters.

But the courts and later government regulators eventually sided with TVA
and allowed the project to proceed.

The momentum shifted by 1977 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
added a number of freshwater mussels to its list of endangered species,
including two in the Duck River: the birdwing pearly mussel and the Cumberland
monkeyface pearly mussel. It determined the mussels would be jeopardized
if the dam was completed.

Efforts to transplant the inch-long creatures to other streams were
unsuccessful, unlike at TVA's Tellico Dam where endangered snail darters
thrived elsewhere and allowed the Little Tennessee River project to be
completed in 1979.

"That pretty well sunk us there," Ferry said of the Columbia project.
In Columbia, seat of the fifth fastest-growing county in Tennessee and
home to the Saturn car plant, business leaders remain disappointed.

"The dam represented our future," said recently departed city manager
William Gentner. "Without a good water supply, we're at the whim of
Mother Nature. And I have yet to see a city grow without ample water."
Columbia resident Ralph Meece is more direct.

"There will be a time when Columbia will be thirsty and stinky," said
Meece, who joined two dozen protesters outside the demolition site in
June. "I'm not for going out and destroying nature, but there's no common
sense, logic or practicality in the Endangered Species Act. At this rate, human
beings will be the endangered species."

Chamber of Commerce President Tony Beyer said most locals backed the dam
in the early years but support eroded.

"I think people just got tired of hearing about it," Beyer said.