Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
something was. So, if we had just had returned to us something from the Secretary for Civil
Works to redo, then we would tell him we just got it back to redo. Then if he would take
umbrage to that, he'd call Secretary Gianelli's office and say, "How come you returned it?"
So, he'd get an answer. Then we would send it back up, and he would know we sent it back
up because he would have called and asked, "Where is it, have you sent it back up? Haven't
you finished it yet?" We'd say, "No, we haven't finished it yet, we're still working on it."
Then it would go up.
We could be passive from our standpoint because he was very actively engaged. Senator
Byrd had a very sharp staff operation that always stayed in tune. He knew the value of
staying in tune and intelligence, and so when the report would go back up they'd know it. It
would stay three weeks in Civil Works, Planning, Lew Blakey's shop. Senator Byrd would
know it was there so he'd be calling them, "Where is it?"
When they'd ship it over to Secretary Gianelli's shop, they would call them and ask, "What
are you going to do with it? When?" So, the secretary could not escape dealing with Senator
Byrd on this issue. I believe he thought he could by burying it with us, but it was not to be
buried because it was so active. So, this put us right in the middle.
In this first episode that I was talking about, in the testimony in February 1981, Gianelli was
not yet aboard, had not yet visited the site, and so this was a very straightforward testimony
about what we planned for the project.
Of course, in the years afterwards, Senator Byrd used the figures and milestones that we had
given that year to say, "You said you were going to do this by this date; where are you now?"
We took Secretary Gianelli to the Tug Fork Valley on a first visit some months later. We
thought it would be straightforward; we would just show him how important this project was,
why it was necessary and all of that. As we flew up the Tug Fork, his disdain for the project
was apparent. We got to Davy, West Virginia, a coal mining community that was really down
and out, with a lot of poverty. It was a place that then Senator Kennedy had visited during his
campaign in '60 and had received a lot of TV coverage. We almost had to land vertically in
the town's softball field to get in there by helicopter. We then got in a panel truck to drive
around through the town. We passed over a stream. The stream was littered with car bodies,
and a couple of diapers were floating down the stream. Seeing this, Secretary Gianelli said,
"These people don't deserve to be helped." We knew we were facing a critic of the project
right there.
Q:
So, was a lot of it a question of definition on his part, do you think? That is to say, you know,
what are you talking about, define it, and then what is the legitimate federal role in that? Is
that more where he was coming, or how much money the federal government should spend
on such things?
A:
I think so. I think there was a legitimate federal role, part of it, and he was carrying the
administration's banner, which was cutting back the amount of federal participation in
things. Plus, there was talk of cutting budgets back and there was the money question. Those
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