________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
clean up the environment. We needed to get the Commonwealth of Kentucky to act. Being
good responsible citizens, they would obviously want to do that same thing.
So, Huntington District approached the governor's office and found that there was not great
interest at the moment in cleaning it up. Consequently, we went into a briefing one day for
Congressman Perkins. I was going to lay out for him how we were going to proceed because
he was badgering Chairman Bevill to get money for the project in that year's budget to get
started. We did have components of the project that we could start--the tunnel for carrying
the waters through the dam and the intake tower. We could start that component, but we
wouldn't want to start it unless we knew we could finish the rest of the project. In our
meetings with EPA, we felt that we could go into the environmental impact process and
demonstrate that if Kentucky cleaned up their law so Ashland Oil would stop contaminating,
we could move it through EPA and Fish and Wildlife and show we were doing a good thing
for the environment. We were going to come up with the right kind of lake.
That process was what we took to Congressman Perkins. "We can get started, but we need
your assistance with your state government to clean up the laws."
Basically, he threw us out of the office at that point. He told General John Wall, the Director
of Civil Works, who was with us, that he wanted some of those combat generals, not all these
environmental generals to talk to him. [Laughter]
Someone who'd go out there and build it, not sit there and talk about how to fix it
environmentally.
Anyway, he basically threw us out of the office because he didn't want to hear about going to
the state to force Ashland Oil into compliance. All he wanted to do was build the dam and
lake. So, we left his office and went back and told Hunter Spillan the outcome of the
conversation. We were getting close to budget time, so they put some words in the budget
that told us to proceed.
Meanwhile, we knew we had to do the right thing by the environment, and so we began to
work with EPA and go through the process, keeping at it, and working against the state,
telling them they really ought to clean up their act. We got EPA to tell them the same.
Sure enough, a few years after I left the division, the commonwealth passed new laws that
effectively closed down Ashland Oil's ability to use that antiquated method of brine
extraction and dumping stuff irresponsibly down hillsides. So, the surface runoff was now
taken care of. Thereby Yatesville Dam was built, we didn't spend million to buy out the
oil field, and we got some good state laws that helped the environment.
The day I left the Ohio River Division and crossed over the Ohio border into West Virginia, I
heard on the radio that Congressman Perkins had died of a heart attack, so he never came to
see it finished. That's the story of Yatesville.
Q:
Is there fishing for bass?
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