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Reviews
| Currents of Change: A History of the Portland District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1980–2000. By Todd Jennings, Lisa Mighetto, and Jill Schnailberg. [Portland, Ore.]: Portland District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2003. v+247 pp., illus., maps, diags., notes, bibl., appendix, index.
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Currents of Change: A History of the Portland District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1980–2000 is a truly revolutionary volume. I have had the good fortune to serve as the historian for the National Canal Museum at Easton, Pennsylvania, for more than a quarter century. I have collected and reviewed many of the publications of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. These publications, particularly the histories of the corps' various districts, have proven to be the best sources of information about the more than 9,000 miles of modern improved inland waterways in this country. These are mainly canalized rivers; they are among the largest and most expensive public works projects that have been undertaken by any nation.
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Previous district histories were primarily oriented toward recounting the technical development of canalized rivers, as well as the corps' other achievements such as flood control and the construction of structures contributing to national defense. Since almost all of these histories were written between 1950 and the late 1970s, not surprisingly they all took as a basic premise that the corps' work represented unalloyed progress. Such intellectual hubris is not found in Currents of Change. Instead, this volume presents a more balanced picture of the work, at least partly in an effort to portray the agency as a kinder, gentler entity that is more in tune with the ecologically aware public environment that emerged in the Portland region during the late-20th century.
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Currents of Change is a well-written, thoroughly researched, and profusely illustrated book, covering the major projects undertaken by the Portland District between 1980 and 2000. Readers who are more technologically savvy will be particularly interested in the many pages that are devoted to the design, construction, and operation of the second powerhouse at the Bonneville Dam complex. The following is excerpted from this portion of the book.
To speed construction, workers on the powerhouse started from both ends and moved toward the middle, working three shifts a day, seven days a week, for three years. Commercial operation of the first unit began in May, 1981. On May 26, 1981, at a dedication ceremony, Lieutenant General J.K. Bratton, Chief of Engineers, called the project "a magnificent achievement." At the ceremony, General Bratton, also commented that he was "looking forward to its completion in the fall of 1982, and another full-power ceremony." The final unit was set in place in June, 1982. Once completed, the second powerhouse measured 985 feet long, 221 feet wide, and 210 feet deep. The eight generators and two smaller fish water generators added 558,000 kilowatts of generating capacity, which more than doubled the project's previous capacity. In 1983, the total cost of the project was estimated at $640 million. A formal dedication ceremony was held on June 1, 1983 to celebrate the Bonneville second powerhouse, which was "probably the last dam of its type to be built on the mighty Columbia River" (pp. 19–20).
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The corps spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on mitigating the detrimental environmental effects of this project. Among the mitigation efforts was the augmentation of the Steigerwald Lake wetlands.
The Steigerwald Lake wetlands became a prominent component of this mitigation. Located on a 1,500-acre floodplain along the Columbia River, the Steigerwald Lake wetland sits adjacent to the city of Washougal, Washington. Throughout the 1980s, conservationists and various state and local agencies discussed the future of the wetland. The debates focused on the price of the property, who would manage it, and how it would be restored. The Corps purchased the tract and transferred management of it to the USFWS, which incorporated it into the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge includes remnant and human-made wetlands, riparian community blocks, developed pastures, a remnant stand of white oak, and Gibbons Creek, which supports small remaining runs of Coho salmon and steelhead as well as a variety of native resident fish (p. 21).
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Much of the rest of Currents of Change is devoted to the Portland District's responses to two great disasters, one natural and the other manmade. The cataclysmic eruption and collapse of Mount St. Helens posed enormous environmental problems that the staff of the Portland District struggled to overcome. The description of their efforts is succinct but complete. Members of the Portland District were more peripherally involved in the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, but, again, their efforts and the lessons learned are well described.
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Canal buffs will be pleased by the many pages of illustrations used to show how the Portland District maintains commercial navigation on long stretches of the Columbia and Snake rivers. The volume examines mechanical wonders, such as the John Day locks, the highest navigation lift locks in the western hemisphere, and the mechanisms of the hopper dredges, which maintain navigation channels.
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The final portion of Currents of Change is devoted to the continuing struggle to rescue the salmon of the Columbia River Basin from extinction. Once one of the most abundant food resources in North America, the numbers of various native salmon species have decreased drastically. Although many factors, such as commercial overfishing, are responsible for their near extinction, the corps received much criticism for its power plants and dams because the operation of turbines was blamed for the deaths of many young salmon migrating to the sea. The final section of the book is devoted to describing future changes that the corps hopes will solve this problem.
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| Compared with Jeff Stine's diatribe against the corps in Mixing the Waters, which focuses on the alleged disastrous environmental impact of the Tennessee Tombigbee Canal, Currents of Change is a more balanced book. It presents the modern Corps of Engineers as a conflicted entity, which is no longer an imperious monolith but a multifaceted agency that must respond to public concerns from a wide variety of constituencies. Finally, like earlier district histories, this book is a major contribution to the continuing chronicle of America's canalized river system. |
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