The Miracle of Rivers
Neuberger, Senator Richard L.
The Miracle of Rivers by Senator Richard L. Neuberger Men have been fascinated by the miracle of rivers ever since the early origins of the human race. Primitive tribes traveled on rivers in crude...
...It was a somber group of Senators who listened to this testimony...
...The Columbia alone carries in its waters 40 per cent of our nation's total hydro-electric capacity...
...Shall they be dissipated and made the object of waste...
...The St...
...I sat at the long green-felt conference table in the same solemn mood, as General Itschner and Senator Ellender continued their startling disclosures...
...said: "We declare war on the United States in peaceful production . . . We will win over the United States...
...by Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, who visited Russia in 1957, and by Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana, who has toured the Soviet Union for each of the past three years and who, in 1957, had the opportunity of seeing remote areas in Siberia never before visited by an official of the U.S...
...Had we voted on Hells Canyon, or TVA self-financing, or a similar program for the Columbia River in that sobering moment, I doubt that there would have been many dissenters...
...But regardless of the initials or appellation applied, a dam by any name is a dam just the same...
...2. Bratsk Dam, Angara River, 3,-340,000 kilowatts...
...This is a permanent city...
...Through authorization by Congress, the New York State Power Authority will tap some 1.8 million kilowatts by drawing off water above Niagara Falls under cover of darkness, when the scenic spectacle will not be jeopardized...
...It sprang from the mind of a progressive Republican President...
...Lawrence Seaway, the proposed high dam at Hells Canyon, or a river pact with Canada on the foaming reaches of the upper Columbia...
...And as of that date, $226 million has been returned to the Treasury to apply on the principal, nearly $80 million ahead of schedule...
...This is the hard core of the TVA idea...
...After these presentations, I felt certain that no more profound mistake could be made by us than to neglect the wise use of America's rivers...
...No such happy and beneficial use of the Columbia River on an international basis can be reported, although the same pair of countries share it...
...2. The Sacramento, Feather, and San Joaquin, in California...
...You see, the alternating current type of transmission line is the only type that has been used in the United States for any distances...
...Uranium may be the fuel of the future, but how does mankind dispose of waste material which can inflict cancer of the bone on future generations...
...The river, released from its rocky prison, widens into a broad swath as it seeks the distant ocean...
...But Russian ton-mileage on its river systems was 175 per cent of 1950 and an unbelievable 820 per cent of 1928...
...government was cutting in half federal investment in the development of its rivers, Soviet Russia accelerated a program headed in the opposite direction...
...When the snowbanks are melting, the mountains trill and echo to the clamorous sound of falling water...
...It is a project which symbolizes the Theodore Roosevelt concept that a river system surges from alpine meadows to the ocean as a unit...
...The water then will be dropped into the Niagara Gorge through huge penstocks during the daylight hours, when low-cost energy is most needed to move the wheels of industry...
...A great deal more electricity can go over an 800-kilovolt direct-current line than would go over an 800-kilovolt alternating-current line...
...Lawrence...
...of even 300,000-kilowatt turbines planned in Russia for the future, thus eclipsing by nearly three times those spinning below the penstocks at Grand Coulee Dam...
...Senator Kerr: "Do you think we would know how to do the same thing in this country...
...Oil wells eventually run dry...
...Lawrence and such great new inland "seaports" as Toronto, Chicago, and Milwaukee...
...Everywhere in these river valleys, men cry out for the beneficial use of water which is now going to waste or even wreaking harm...
...3. Stalingrad Dam, Volga River, 2,350,000 kilowatts...
...This may be the dominant question of our time...
...In examining that story we should first understand that our own nation is not alone in possessing rivers of truly great magnitude...
...Where they merge, a creek takes form...
...On the silt-laden Colorado River, which men once described as "too thick to drink and too thin to plow," it is needed to provide water lor thirsty Los Angeles and for potentially-fertile valleys in the distant uplands of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado...
...The suggestion is no longer a political canard...
...The TVA idea of unified stream development, from Teddy Roosevelt's "headwaters in the forest to its mouth on the coast," was never more urgently needed in America than today...
...Finally, the first John Day Dam appropriations were put through by Senator Carl Hayden, Democratic chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, over the antagonism of President Eisenhower's Bureau of the Budget...
...In hydro-electric development, according to General Itschner, "the Soviets already approach us in total installed capacity and have individual projects under construction that far exceed any American project in capacity...
...The reservoir behind a dam can provide swimming for many, and at the same time it can prevent disastrous floods from inundating great cities far below on the coastal plain...
...These reservoirs have not been built because unified development is lacking...
...Within these categories, there are subdivisions...
...By way of contrast, the largest power plant in America is Grand Coulee on the Columbia River—until now, Number One on earth—whose capacity is 1,944,000 kilowatts—less than any of the four Russian giants, and less than 50 per cent of that of the fabulous project rising across the Yenisei River in Siberia...
...In the last budget prepared by President Truman, the United States government spent on all its federal power undertakings—TVA, Columbia River projects, Bureau of Reclamation, Southwestern and the Southeastern Power Administrations —a total of $681 million...
...Rivers replenish the ocean, and water from the ocean is sucked into the heavens and dropped as snow and rain on the mountain ranges, where rivers are cradled...
...Five major watershed areas, scattered all the way across the nation, are most susceptible to this kind of treatment...
...A single rampant barge of this sinister sludge terrorized shipping on our Eastern seaboard...
...When such plans are made, we shall find that, instead of interfering, one use can often be RICHARD L. NEUBERGER, U.S...
...This compares with some 8,000 in General Itschner's own agency, and another 4,000 in the employ of the U.S...
...He said to Congress half a century ago, in 1908: "Every stream should be used to its utmost...
...They have shown a very great ability in designing lines of this type...
...Before China was taken over by the Communists, many Americans predicted that this ancient nation might be rehabilitated by a TVA on the Yangtze...
...The Theodore Roosevelt-TVA idea of unified and full river devolpment has been an influence in Russian technological gains—in transportation as well as in industrial production...
...Yet upstream storage reservoirs on the main stem of the Columbia, in Canada, could add the equivalent of four extra Bonneville Dams to federal generating capacity in the United States—to say nothing of far more kilowatts north of the border in British Columbia...
...Lawrence Seaway is a joint undertaking of the United States and Canada...
...In comparison, total American hydro-electric capacity at the end of 1957 was 27,676,000 kilowatts, with about 10,-000,000 more kilowatts under construction...
...In this same category are such institutions as passports, customs duties, tariffs, and doctrines like states' rights or national sovereignty...
...They are: 1. The Columbia, in the Pacific Northwest...
...already it requires at least 20 times as much drilling in Texas to bring in a single barrel as it does in the Middle East...
...But fields of wheat in many realms of the world needed water for irrigation, before this grain could grow...
...5. The St...
...Despite the coolness of his regime to federal power development generally, President Eisenhower quoted from Theodore Roosevelt's statement about each river system being "a single unit" when he signed the bill in 1955 authorizing a costly network of storage dams on the upper reaches of the Colorado...
...Each of the generators at Krasnoyarsk will produce 286,000 kilowatts...
...A river never sleeps...
...Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, for many years a prominent advocate of reclamation projects, was especially interested when Senator Ellender described the model city being constructed for the workers who will erect the immense Stalingrad Dam on the Volga River...
...Yet here, as in the TVA itself, revenues from the sale of hydro-electricity will eventually help to finance the entire undertaking, although tolls also will be collected from the freighters which ply between the Gulf of St...
...Khrushchev knows that the four TVA's Kentucky Dam is of tremendous value in regulating flood waters in the lower Ohio and Mississippi Rivers...
...Snow falls perennially in the mountains and forms icefields and glaciers, which melt in the midday sun...
...Boundaries, after all, are made by men...
...This process was under way epochs before Neanderthal man...
...The United States has no plants completed which will reach the 2,000,000-kilowatt mark, although John Day Dam...
...Thus," continued General Itschner, "right now Soviet hydro-electric development appears to be roughly equal to ours in amount...
...So the massive strength of rivers was tapped to move still larger wooden wheels in order that water from these rivers could be deposited on furrows which required such life-giving succor...
...Dick," he said, "that is an oil well which will never run dry, a coal mine which will never thin out...
...The cost of the St...
...While the Chief of our Corps of Army Engineers was speaking, I wondered if any twinges of conscience pricked those political spokesmen for the private-power companies who had tried so hard to discourage the construction of dams, which have increased by many-fold the barge commerce on the Columbia River where it cuts through the Cascade Mountain Range...
...Four of them will be the mightiest hydroelectric plants ever built...
...in connection with this city they have hospitals, schools of all kinds, kindergarten and secondary schools, even technical schools, wherein the workers who work on the dam and who will probably be workers later when electricity is used to produce manufactured goods, can go to school in order to prepare themselves for the coming event when Stalingrad Dam is completed . . . They also have a large cultural center where children of the workers, as well as the workers themselves, who play music or who desire to take up drama in connection with their work, can come in and exhibit their talents...
...Each river system, from its headwaters in the forest to its mouth on the coast, is a single unit and should be treated as such...
...But," said General Itschner, "the Soviets have shown marked ingenuity in dealing with this handicap...
...Does it exceed us in the capacity to sacrifice, so that a way of life—either of tyranny or freedom—may continue and endure...
...4. The Missouri, on the Great Plains...
...Five years ago this policy underwent an abrupt change...
...After years of delicate negotiations, the obstacle of the international border at least has been overcome...
...More than 40 river projects are under construction in Russia...
...It is as simple as that...
...If this policy persists, we shall have only ourselves to blame for wasting much of the sustenance and sinews of America...
...A river flows on forever...
...Primitive tribes traveled on rivers in crude dugout canoes, and dragged fish from the swift riffles of these rivers...
...When Franklin D. Roosevelt sat in the White House, his political enemies charged that he hoped to establish a TVA on the Danube...
...Through the long afternoon the comparisons continued—of 2,200-horsepower tugboats on Russian rivers, rivaling any such craft in the United States...
...Coal mines wear out, and miners decline to work underground...
...3. The Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains...
...Interest paid on the government funds was $161 million...
...A proposed 6,000,000-kilowatt dam will be across the Yenisei, in icy Siberia...
...Water, of course, is virtually inexhaustible...
...Throughout the United States, this concept is urgently necessary today...
...Energy reserves may shape the destiny of world conflict, because all industrial output rests ultimately on units of energy...
...The Krasnoyarsk Dam on the Yenisei River will hoist ships 370 vertical feet, as compared with the 100 feet of the great McNary Dam lock on the Columbia River...
...Senator with snow-white hair and a valiant soul who knew them both—George W. Norris of Nebraska...
...They are: 1. Krasnoyarsk Dam, Yenisei River, 4,004,000 kilowatts...
...This has nothing to do with state or national boundaries...
...General Itschner: "I am sure we can do it, sir, but we have not yet accomplished it...
...I saw huge apartment houses built along wide avenues, lined with trees...
...Lawrence has quite a large hydro capacity, but aside from that, the other rivers do not have a very large amount," General Itschner said...
...On the sluggish Missouri, it is needed to level off floods and to improve navigation far into eastern Montana...
...That is the way we do it in the West—build our cities first," said Senator Watkins...
...As commerce multiplied through the locks on the Volga and other great rivers, American dominance in this realm was narrowing...
...Our destiny in power energy lies in waterfalls and that is why the warnings of such pilgrims as Senator Ellender and General Itschner must be heeded...
...Lawrence Seaway, where a 27-foot navigation channel is being tooled from the Atlantic's waters to the Great Lakes...
...In the river basin of the greatest hydro-electric resources, that of the majestic Columbia, many bipartisan groups today are calling for a Regional Power Corporation that would be extensively modeled after the TVA self-financing act, approved by the Senate last summer...
...Even the later frontiersmen and pioneers in buckskin were unaware that in every waterfall hovered a source of fuel mightier and more enduring than any yet discovered...
...Obviously," said General Itschner, "the Soviets are only beginning to learn to use their waterways in the modern sense with which we Americans are familiar...
...When mankind had advanced farther from the cave, rivers were used to turn wooden wheels which ground grist to flour...
...Eventually, the ramparts of the gorge soften into the timbered slopes of wide valleys...
...made to assist another...
...General Emerson C. Itschner, chief of the Corps of Army Engineers, has pointed out the sobering geographical fact that of American rivers only the Columbia "begins to compare with the four major rivers in Siberia" in hydro-electric capacity...
...If Russia taps the Yenisei while we fritter away the Snake, who is at fault except ourselves...
...Two of these magnificent waterways are involved in international negotiations...
...4. Kuibyshev Dam, Volga-Samara Rivers, 2,100,000 kilowatts...
...Nearly three decades later, his distant cousin, a liberal Democrat named Franklin D. Roosevelt, put it into practical effect in the watershed of the Tennessee River...
...Senator from Oregon, has specialized as a writer and legislator in the field of conservation and water-resource development...
...Declared General Itschner in summary: "The Soviet water resource is demonstrating to the world what can be done in this field by well-considered, long-range planning and a willingness to make sacrifices in present standards of living in order to achieve the goal of a great future industrial development...
...government since 1953...
...General Itschner does not share this notion...
...The Eisenhower Administration, while indifferent to the TVA which Franklin Roosevelt developed on the Tennessee River, has talked frequently of advancing American funds for a TVA on the legendary River Nile, so that Egypt can become a land of industry and prosperous farms...
...Many of them await the kind of unified development symbolized by the TVA, the integrated program which Theodore Roosevelt had in mind when he spoke of treating as a whole "each river system, from its headwaters in the forest to its mouth on the coast...
...Their destiny has been shaped by geography rather than by resolutions or treaties...
...Being a soldier subject to superior orders, General Itschner did not add that the Republican Administration—plus its allies in Congress—had fought for four years to block construction of John Day by the federal government...
...Bureau of Reclamation...
...American ton-mileage on its waterways in 1956 amounted to 130 per cent of 1950 and over 200 per cent of 1928...
...However, their rate of increase is greater than ours...
...Rivulets seep through the glacial moraine and merge...
...major rivers of Siberia—as well as the other great waterways of his country—could be heavy artillery in that rivalry...
...By the fiscal year of 1957, under the hostile spell of the Republican residency at the White House, this sum had dwindled to $316 million...
...But, as boundaries were laid down, it became more difficult to put these rivers to full and untram-meled use...
...But rivers recognize none of these artificial or synthetic lines...
...I stood looking at Bonneville Dam with former Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman...
...They are the Columbia and the St...
...First, the General told us how Soviet use of inland waterways was beginning to challenge the superiority of the United States...
...Rivers rushing downhill may be the muscles of a continent...
...While Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S. Truman, were in the White House, exactly 20 multipurpose projects were approved for the Columbia Basin...
...Located near the mouth of the Tennessee in Kentucky, the dam creates a reservoir 184 miles long with a capacity great enough to lower a flood crest on the Ohio at Cairo, 111., by as much as four feet...
...General Itschner: "Yes, Mr...
...Friends of that outpost of democracy in the Middle East, Israel, speak hopefully of a TVA on the Jordan River, where the Scriptures were written...
...That reason is the sweeping program of unified development presently under way on the stupendous rivers of the Soviet Union—one of the dramatic stories of this century...
...This does not take into consideration, of course, the tremendous cash benefits accruing to the government through increased taxes paid by individuals and industries which depend ori-federally-generated power...
...The link between the reign of these two Presidents was a mild, tenacious U.S...
...A leading advocate of such an undertaking is Oregon's traditionally-Republican newspaper, the Oregonian, which not long ago called attention to the fact that "as of June 30, 1957, Congress had appropriated approximately $1.8 billion for all [federal] power projects in the Columbia River system...
...We do not do it that thoroughly, though," replied Senator Ellender...
...of 6,000,000 Russian agricultural acres brought under irrigation between 1951 and 1956, as compared with 5,500,000 acres in the United States...
...They disappear over cliffs in rockets of spray, but take shape again in icy pools at the bottom...
...And so the Selway flows to the Lochsa, the Lochsa to the Middle Fork, the Middle Fork to the Clearwater, the Clearwater to the Snake River, the Snake at last to the Columbia, and the Columbia on to the sea...
...In the famous interview with Khrushchev on the CBS Face the Nation television program, the top man of the U.S.S.R...
...Lawrence Seaway is about $1 billion, with some $300 million invested in the navigation improvements and the rest in the colossal power plants...
...And there would not even be a Grand Coulee in the United States today, if the Washington Water Power Company had been as successful in its opposition a quarter of a century ago as the Idaho Power Company has been in our own time, in seeking to block the great Hells Canyon project on the Snake River along the Oregon-Idaho boundary...
...Nor did the General reveal that nearly 3,000,-000 acre-feet of water had been eliminated from "the sufficient upstream storage" which he mentioned by the decision of President Eisenhower's Administration to substitute three small private-utility dams for the great federal high dam at Hells Canyon...
...No multi-purpose projects have been authorized for construction by the U.S...
...The tale was told to us by General Itschner, who, as chief of the Army Engineer Corps, is responsible for the bulk of our federal river projects...
...But a river flows on forever...
...Nature was generous in endowing America with rivers...
...I felt equally sure that, if all the people of our land could have heard what was said by these three men, there never again would be a concerted voice raised in opposition to such undertakings as the TVA, Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams, the St...
...I recently toured the St...
...Theodore Roosevelt, that militant 26th President who loved the outdoors, may have been the father of the TVA idea because he understood the phenomena of nature, where the birth of great rivers occurs...
...Boats" can mean a family's aluminum canoe or a throbbing diesel tug hauling half-a-dozen barges loaded with petroleum or wheat...
...It exceeds us in area, in population, and in discipline...
...In every river that rushes downhill, the same water can be used to float boats, irrigate land, generate power, and provide habitat for fisheries...
...He serves on the two major Senate committees concentrating in these fields, the Interior and the Public Works Committees...
...Many Americans have a conception of Russia as a nation without technical skills...
...The St...
...It will still continue, even if man manages to destroy himself with Strontium-90 and hydrogen weapons...
...government...
...Chairman...
...Indeed, the Soviets have given water-resource development a priority second only to the development of heavy industry designed to support military programs...
...Innumerable creeks find their way downhill, through chasms and ravines...
...Furthermore, General Itschner has estimated that at least 25,000 trained Soviet engineers are concentrating on the Russian water-development program...
...They seek unified development, although some shun the controversial initials "TVA...
...Lawrence, in the Northeast...
...And now a new and compelling reason exists for harnessing the magnificent rivers by which America pours its tribute of snow and ice and rain to the eternal oceans...
...Instead, it submits to sublime natural processes, by which dense forests permit precipitation from snow and rain to flow to the sea...
...this compares with 108,000 kilowatts for the biggest American generators, presently in operation at Grand Coulee...
...government...
...Thus, the same dam of concrete and steel can (1) store water to retard or prevent floods, (2) drown out rapids which impede navigation, (3) provide locks to get tows and freighters past the dam itself, (4) pump some of the stored water to irrigate arid land for agriculture, and (5) generate vast quantities" of hydro-electricity which will produce enough revenue to amortize the cost of the whole undertaking—principal, plus interest...
...They rib out the continent from sea to shining sea...
...of a Soviet reclamation project in the South Ukraine which will pump water to 8,500,000 acres, as contrasted with the 1,200,000 acres of the Columbia Basin project, biggest in the United States...
...But while the U.S...
...What is a multi-purpose project...
...Today, the total known capacity of Soviet hydro-electric plants is 25,-883,188 kilowatts, although this does not include 44 plants for which output has not been disclosed...
...No stream can be so used unless such use is planned in advance...
...Like capillaries uniting to create a vein or artery, all the creeks and brooks from the highlands finally blend in some gorge of awesome depth and proportions...
...He told our Committee: "A major feature of Soviet power development is the construction of a national transmission grid which will bring electricity, generated sometimes at remote hydro stations, to industrial centers of the U.S.S.R...
...Need there be any more conclusive evidence that federal investment in great rivers is just about the safest, most solvent expenditure made by the U.S...
...Now, we see here a direct-current type of transmission that reaches up to 800 kilovolts...
...In one shattering burst, the Soviet Union has moved from peasantry to the industrial age...
...For many years, American engineers predicted that Russia's brutal winters would make impossible any successful water-power projects on rivers which freeze as hard as granite nearly five months of the year...
...It is eternal...
...The beginnings of this plan already have been accomplished . . ." General Itschner, under questioning, emphasized that "building this equipment required Soviet engineers to solve unprecedented electro-mechanical problems...
...Details of this program were described to the Senate Interior Committee by three qualified men, while fellow members and I sat in fascination...
...Yet the TVA idea is not exclusively for export...
...In the sunrise of history, men of course knew nothing of the unseen giant of hydro-electricity, which lurked wherever a river foamed over a precipice or shot through slanting narrows...
...The discussion then continued: Senator O'Mahoney: "If that is the case, General, I assume it is your opinion that the technical knowledge and efficiency of Soviet engineers should not be underestimated...
...on the Columbia River, on which construction will start this year, will ultimately have 2,000,000 kilowatts if sufficient upstream storage is developed to make this amount of capacity economically justified...
...At Barn-hart Island, some two million kilowatts will be a collateral benefit of this undertaking...
...When I stand on the banks of a stream in my own home region, I think of the incredible folly of those who would abandon such a resource...
...In the vast Central Valley of California, it is needed to transfer water from the snow-cushioned mountains of the north to orchards and lettuce fields parched for lack of irrigation in the south...
...It is ironic that the Soviet Union has turned to its great rivers for strength just at a time when the American government is in the hands of the first administration in over two decades which has been fundamentally inhospitable to the whole idea of federal multi-purpose river projects...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
