Engineer Memoirs
There were two main bottlenecks to the movement of most of the ore. One was the
Saint Mary's River at the outfall of Lake Superior. The other was at Detroit, the Saint
Clair River. The first problem was to break the ice.
But that wasn't the greatest problem. The greatest problem was to control the
consequences of breaking the ice. Under natural conditions if the ice was allowed to
form, it would form a protective cover, and the river would flow normally under the ice.
If the ice was broken, you risked building up ice dams. Every time the ice was broken,
it would refreeze. With repeated breaking there would be ice all the way from the
surface right down to the bottom of the river, and this would dam the river. Then you'd
have all kinds of flooding, interruption of flows, and related problems. This had all kinds
of environmental consequences.
The problem was, could we come up with a way to keep the channel open that would
allow navigation late into the winter? We tried this. There was one winter when the
ships operated all winter. That was a mild winter.
This program raised an interesting issue on whether or not you finish a study. The
program was funded as a study. The object, I thought, was to get a project authorized
that would provide for the Corps to do certain things that were necessary to keep
navigation open and would authorize some of the activities of the Coast Guard and so
forth.
I pushed that along. We had to have an environmental impact statement as well as a
study report. I kept pushing. When I was getting ready to leave in December of '73, I
felt that it was within six months of being done. In fact, I tried to get it done before I
left, but there were some delays.
Well, they never finished it. The reason they never did affords an interesting insight on
the way these things work. I think a judgment was made that they never really could get
this project authorized. They could have had a report. They could have sent it to
Washington. They could have sent it to Congress. But there were definitely different
sets of people.
The power companies didn't like this because disruption of the flow of the water
interfered with the generation of power. The environmentalists didn't like it because
there was a lot of damage from the ice. The conclusion was that if they could think of
reasons to go on studying it, they could think of reasons to go on passing ships, because
the experimental work to pass the ships was allowing them to do what they wanted to
do.
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