________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Now, what the decision means is that you turn off power to a very large number of people
and a large number of industries. You do the economics and you find out this has a very high
dollar impact. We did the same analysis for the Monongahela River and all the others. We
did our homework and we could say, "We think it'll cost this number of jobs," and that was
the impact we submitted.
Now, the problem I had was that in the secretary's opening testimony to Congress in
February 1982 he stated that it was the Corps' idea to do all these cuts and that he was going
to require us to relook the cost and impacts. I'm sitting in the back of the room, knowing that
he, Gianelli, had directed us to do that and we'd already made all those impacts and
submitted them to his office. He knew they were catastrophic.
Over the following weeks, then, we had to grapple with this issue. Congressman Carrol
Hubbard, from Paducah, responding to his constituents who ran a lot of towboats out of
Paducah, asked Gianelli to come out to a meeting. He said he'd come. I was with him, and at
the meeting he said, "Well, those Corps of Engineers, you know how they are. They try to do
these kinds of things but I'm going to relook at how they answer your needs." I'm sitting
there beside him and I know full well that for six weeks he's had the facts about the impacts
of his river system closures and knows that and what to do with them.
So, in the end, those waterways weren't cut back because the impacts were too great.
Q:
Should we turn to the Green and Kentucky Rivers?
A:
There were two locks at the far end of the Green River that weren't getting much commercial
use. We already had been looking to try to pull locks out of the system that didn't have a
commercial role. We had closed the Muskingum River in Ohio and given the locks to the
state years before. Ohio was now unhappy because it had all these locks and they weren't
commercially viable.
It's not always a great deal to get stuff back from the feds, the Corps because it usually
represents something no longer worth having. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't get rid of it.
The Kentucky River was an issue, and continued operation of the locks had been challenged
by the Corps headquarters. We were looking at the Kentucky and had the Louisville District
Engineer, Colonel Gene Eastburn, come up and brief. The first four locks carried commercial
tonnage, almost all of it being sand and gravel, a small operation of 10,000 to 12,000 tons per
year. Above those four, there was no commercial traffic--Locks 5 to 14. Therefore, I
deduced there was no federal interest in maintaining them so we ought to close them. We
began working with the district to make that happen.
During 1982 we basically closed the system by taking the operators off, leaving a skeleton
crew for maintenance, to the point where if we had a tow, we would send somebody there to
operate the locks. As a practical matter, that basically closed the Kentucky River system
above Lock 4.
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