________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
A:
Yes. The positions were combined back together, and he's come back.
Q:
Whom you knew from Europe?
A:
That's right, we knew each other in Europe.
Q:
Before we leave civil works, what about Yatesville Lake?
A:
Yatesville was a very interesting story, and I think a compliment to how the Corps can make
things happen.
Carl Perkins was the congressman from eastern Kentucky and was the sponsor for Yatesville
Lake. He already had five Corps lakes in his district. I say that just because a lot of people
brought that up from time to time.
There were environmental problems with building Yatesville Lake. When General Heiberg
was division engineer, he didn't particularly want to proceed with Yatesville Lake. He'd
come to the determination that it was not a good project, that we should not proceed, that it
was environmentally damaging and we shouldn't do it.
When I arrived, I found myself faced with a lot of pressure from Congressman Perkins to get
started on building 18-mile-long Yatesville Lake. At the same time, there were the questions
on the environment. Huntington District came in one day and said, "We have a major
problem. We've tested the waters of the river, and it has an extremely high brine content
because the Martha Oil Field is located just above it."
Ashland Oil was operating this oil field, and they had a low-level extraction procedure going
on. Long ago the wells were basically finished, and now they were pumping brine into the
wells to force out oil. They were reaping very little, like a barrel a week, from some of them.
They were running that brine straight down the hillside into the streams, heading towards the
creek that became the river that was going to become the lake behind Yatesville Dam.
Huntington District said, "We're going to have Dead Sea II here if we build this lake. It will
be too briny; it will not support fishing or anything else."
When that had been passed to Congressman Perkins, he said, "It's all false. Best bass fishing
in the world is right there where those two tributaries come together and where we were
going to build that dam. I catch bass there all the time. Best bass fishing in the world."
When you reviewed the brine content of samples measured by Huntington District, you knew
that we had two views of the world here. [Laughter]
Meanwhile, trying to determine how we could proceed, we had to do the right thing, which
means we couldn't build a dam that's going to be Dead Sea II. At the same time there were
the pressures to get on with the congressionally approved project. The question was, "How
do we work this thing and do the right thing?"
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