Ernest Graves
They were going to have a perpetual study which would be doing the same things that
the project would do. They would be allowed to do these things without an authorized
project. If you said, "All right, the study is finished, now we want it to be authorized,"
they wouldn't ever get it authorized, and then they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
That may seem somewhat involved, but this is an example of American politics at work.
Q:
It sure is.
A:
There's a lot of this going on in our government. The perpetual study allowed winter
navigation, whereas if you finished the study and tried to get an authorized project for
winter navigation, you never would have gotten it, and they wouldn't have been able
to move the ships anymore. I'm not sure what the situation is now. But that was the
situation for many years.
The other phenomenon which I've run into many times in my career is that in the early
stages of something, you can really make progress. But if it has inherent problems, as
time goes on, it crawls to a halt. The nuclear excavation of the sea-level canal was like
this. When we were in the early stages of planning for this, everything moved along
smoothly. As we got deeper into it and got to understanding it more, we ran into a lot
of problems we weren't able to solve, and the thing finally ground to a halt.
The winter navigation was somewhat that way. At the early stages, everything was
going along pretty well. But then, we ran into the shore damage. We ran into the
troubles with the power companies. The problems of the program tended to bog it
down.
Trying to write the environmental impact statement for the winter navigation was a real
problem. When you start talking about the environmental impact of this ice breaking,
we had incredible difficulty trying to estimate just how much damage was due to the
winter navigation and how much would have occurred anyway.
We had the people from the Corps up at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering
Laboratory working on this problem, trying to help us make estimates of what would
happen to the ice. But it was very difficult. In spite of the fact that they had a lot of
knowledge, you couldn't model this ice-breaking, for example. Without a model it was
hard to estimate how much ice would be generated and how much shore damage would
result.
Then you got into the possibility that there would have to be a compensation program.
If you broke ice on the river, if there were people on the shore and their docks got
carried away with the ice, then you'd have to pay them for the docks and so forth.
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