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Reviews
| Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. By David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2006. xiv+369 pp., illus., diags., maps, notes, bibl., index. $36.95 hb (ISBN 0-8061-3795-9).
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This is a mature composition by authors capable of clarifying a complex technical subject and blending it into a public history narrative in a precise yet vibrant style. David Billington and Donald Jackson make extensive use of archival documents and photos of federal water agencies, and in doing so provide insiders' perspectives on the engineering of large multipurpose dams during the interwar years.
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Although the Tennessee Valley Authority has garnered much of the glory for federal dam building during the New Deal, Billington and Jackson present an alternative narrative, focusing, instead, on the American West. In the vast American West, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found a new home and the Bureau of Reclamation, a new purpose. During the Depression their public works projects fulfilled utilitarian functions, putting people to work, breaking the monopolies of private electric utilities, and harnessing natural resources for renewable energy. However, the iconic forms of Hoover, Bonneville, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Ft. Peck dams can be traced to state-of-the-art designs evolved earlier in the 20th century and therefore represent a more extensive legacy of national water-resource management.
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The authors advance the thesis that engineers chose recognizable forms to intuitively confer an all-important sense of safety and permanence on large-scale, publicly financed dams. Emerging trial-load analysis and modeling of dams with thin profiles in arch forms had verified that such innovations were not only stable but also could be built with less material and at lower costs than heavy masonry dams. Yet the prudent technical elite of the government bureaucracy opted to follow the trail of design precedents that relied on the massive weight of materials to resist water pressure. Their argument complements and confirms previous evidence of resistance to dam innovations presented by Terry S. Reynolds in "A Narrow Window of Opportunity: The Rise and Fall of the Fixed Steel Dam" (IA 15, No. 1, 1989, p. 1–20). With these technical pedigrees in mind, the authors then present the new big dams in four geographic contexts: the Colorado, Columbia, and Missouri River basins, and California's Central Valley.
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These four contexts provide distinctive environmental settings for dramatic portrayals of technical achievements. However, selectively viewing complex river-basin hydrologies and using them as backdrops for depicting civil-engineering problem solving during a turbulent period occasionally add elements of mystery to the study and yield mixed results. Where problem, agency, method, and purpose are captured in momentary alignment, their images are clear. Billington and Jackson's representations become blurrier when the human and environmental impacts of the innovations disappear at the margins of the frames.
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Professors at leading universities, Billington and Jackson introduce the civil engineering principles of dams as skillful, patient educators. The initial chapter contains mini-lessons in the theoretical hydraulics and mathematical analysis that informed dam engineering in the early-20th century. These lessons are presented in the context of the new Bureau of Reclamation exploring the structural tradition of arch dams but then adapting the massive tradition embodied in the municipal reservoirs in the East to its irrigation projects in the arid West.
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Chapter 2 explains how keeping rivers open for shipping and safe from floods brought the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers into the emerging field of multipurpose dams, focusing on the Wilson and Tygart dams. The photos illustrate extensive linear structures with curved overflow spillways and lift gates and a developing capacity for river control at a time when federal agencies were virtually excluded from commercial hydropower. However, the authors do not analyze the technical capabilities that would later shape multipurpose dams, such as the incorporation of hydraulic turbines into dams and the growing scientific understanding of river-basin hydrology. Nor do they link the Corps' expertise in dredging rivers and building levees to the techniques of constructing earthen dams.
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Creating jobs in a remote region suffering from floods, droughts, and farm failures was the paramount consideration in rapidly constructing the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River from materials at hand. Billington and Jackson point out that interagency bickering over projects continued while earthen slurry dredged from the riverbed was pumped into the heart of an artificial landform. Theoretical soil mechanics was just formalizing the counterintuitive, slippery notion that mud could provide an impervious core material for embankment dams. When the dam slid in 1938, academics and practitioners pointed fingers. Carl Terzaghi identified liquefaction as the cause of the failure, while Middlebrooks and others defended the use of hydraulic fill. This extended debate identified compacted materials for subsequent storages on the Missouri and defined the state-of-the-art for the global proliferation of embankment dams after World War II. It also is an instructive reminder of the widespread hazards posed by smaller earthen dams across America.
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The interpretive narrative resonates in a watershed like the Missouri, where the interagency Pick-Sloan plan advocated a string of storage dams for flood control and irrigation and became de-facto regional water law in the absence of an interstate compact or river valley authority. Where these agencies contested separately with other parties, the authors elucidate the volume's secondary theme: that reciprocal relationships among politics, engineering, and organizations are reflected in dam design and construction.
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The study of dams on the Colorado illuminates federal agencies using their expanding authority to manage rather than produce innovation. The interstate Colorado River compact, painstakingly forged during the 1920s, insured the ascendancy of greater Los Angeles over an extra-regional water source. The multipurpose Hoover Dam designed by the Bureau of Reclamation became the mechanism for sharing common resources. A consortium of engineering firms, led by Morrison-Knudsen, actually constructed the reservoir. The diagram of the powerhouses (p. 143) illustrates that Reclamation leased space and power-generation equipment to municipal authorities and privately owned utilities. These local institutions had responsibility for pumping water through an aqueduct and delivering electricity to growing towns between the Colorado River and Los Angeles. The costs of Hoover Dam were recovered through local rates as homeowners bought houses increasingly packaged with electrical and aquatic amenities.
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The authors only hint at the deepening congruence of corporate farming, industry, population growth, and western water projects. In reality the multipurpose federal dams on the watersheds of Pacific West became engines powering a rapidly growing region of a bi-coastal economy. This orderly response to the dynamics of settlement is best seen in the hydropower development of the Columbia River.
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Bonneville Dam near Portland became the first of many to tap the enormous waterpower potential of the Columbia River. Additional dams upstream needed even more capacious storages. The authors argue a counterfactual premise, that the builders of Grand Coulee Dam rejected a viable multiarch buttress design in favor of an industrial-strength gravity dam. The evidence proves that the mechanization of construction at Grand Coulee was built upon research and technical precedents established at Hoover Dam.
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The legislation enacting the Bonneville Power Administration did not have to confer sweeping river valley authority on an agency operating under the Department of Interior. By keeping the electricity rates of Columbia River hydro projects among the lowest in the nation and by establishing 50 years as a reasonable period for amortization of capital investment, the new federal agency forged an impregnable interstate chain of covenants with local interests throughout the Pacific Northwest. The time horizon not only attracted investments in power-intensive industries but also demonstrated that federal agencies alone had the commanding vision and capacities for super-sized projects. This self-replicating pattern clearly whetted central California's enormous appetite for water and power.
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For the study of the Central Valley Project, the authors rely heavily on the research of Donald Pisani, who views local riparian water law as a complex impediment shaping agricultural development. This line of argument holds sway as they recount the longitudinal water swap as the underlying rationale for building Shasta Dam on the northern Sacramento River and pumping fresh water southward into the San Joaquin. Had the authors developed the common theme of hydropower as the prime mover for California's interbasin water transfers, they might have viewed their Colorado River case study as a companion to the Central Valley Project chapter, instead of as a bookend.
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Nevertheless, the authors would doubtlessly concede that the purpose of dams is largely in the eye of the beholder. This richly illustrated, intelligent study illuminates a highly controversial subject through careful historical research and contributes to scholarship on issues of infrastructure.
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| When the longevity and the stability of national infrastructure is being questioned and there is rising sentiment in favor of breaching and removing dams for environmental purposes, this work contains timely lessons. These lessons are essential for an emerging generation that faces a changing climate and a loss of confidence in civic works. A deeper understanding of the heritage of the federal water sector is vital to reassessments of the nation's built environment. |
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