Engineer Memoirs
Also, there was a change in congressmen. The member of Congress who had supported
the project all along was defeated for reelection and there was a new congressman from
the area.
So over time the enthusiasm for LaFarge waned. Nevertheless, the construction went
ahead. They built the intake structure and part of the embankment. They were nearly
ready for closure when the water project review took place.
LaFarge was one of the marked projects in that. It had problems on its benefit-to-cost
ratio. It had problems because it was a shallow lake and there was a lot of concern
about eutrophication in these lakes when they were not deep enough.
Wisconsin was no longer enthusiastic about it, and the congressman from the area
wasn't. The people that had been flooded out time and again by the river ended up
being a minority, and it got dropped.
It's hard to say about a project like LaFarge. I haven't followed the flood history since
then. I think it was neither as good as some people claimed, nor was it as bad as others
said.
Q:
Which is usually the case, isn't it?
A:
Yes. But they didn't do it.
Q:
Right. Did you get into the whole issue then of nonstructural solutions?
A:
There were proposals for this, and the Corps thought this was great. OMB thought it
was terrible because they could see a lot of money being spent this way.
The Corps came up with an excellent nonstructural project for the lowlands upstream
on the Charles River in Boston. In this project the federal government was going to
help acquire a lot of the lowlands along the Charles River that would have been
developed. If they were developed, they would have been filled. Then this natural
reservoir which had helped to ameliorate flooding on the Charles would have been filled
up.
The Corps did pursue this, and the Charles River project was carried out. But OMB
was inalterably opposed to this type of project because it got the federal government
into paying a lot of acquisition costs for land.
Prairie de Chien [Wisconsin], of course, was another case. It went ahead. But once
OMB focused on the implications of these projects, they became a major policy issue.
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