Some Dam – Hydro Newstm

6/01/2012 Some Dam – Hydro News TM And Other Stuff i Quote of Note: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." --Theodore Roosevelt “Good wine is a necessity of life.” - -Thomas Jefferson Ron’s wine pick of the week: Castoro Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon “No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.” - - Thomas Jefferson DDamsams: (If you missed it last week on PBS, you could drive to a local theater.) DAMMING ‘BIG MUDDY’ Documentary about Fort Peck Dam construction comes to public television May 25, 2012, billingsgazette.com • By Jaci Webb Telling the story in one hour of the herculean effort it took to redirect the longest river in the U.S. and construct the Fort Peck Dam was a challenge for filmmaker Scott Sterling. The result, the Montana PBS documentary “Fort Peck Dam,” brings all the elements of this fascinating story together with interviews with folks who were there. “Fort Peck Dam” will be shown free at 7 p.m. 1 Copy obtained from the National Performance of Dams Program: http://npdp.stanford.edu June 14 at the Babcock Theatre; June 15 at 7 p.m. at the Custer County Art & Heritage Center in Miles City; and at 7 p.m. June 23 at the Fort Peck Theater in Fort Peck. Sterling said he worked hard to make the film a story about the people, not just the project initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create jobs during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ten days after Roosevelt signed the order for the project, workers started showing up in Fort Peck. Montanans and married men with families were given priority. The building of boomtowns During its peak in 1936, the construction site of the Army Corps of Engineers employed 10,000 people. Because many of those workers were family men who brought their wives and children, it was estimated that 40,000 people were living in the 18 boomtowns that faded back into the prairie after the project was completed in 1940. Only the incorporated towns of Glasgow, Fort Peck and Nashua survived. Sterling tapped into the Army Corps of Engineers’ archive of 8,000 photos and 30 hours of film. He also placed ads around Montana looking for anyone who worked on the project or lived in the boomtowns. He found a few gems, including Joseph A. Morin Jr., now 97, who went searching for his birth certificate to get on the project. In the film, Morin says the Wolf Point hospital where he was born had a record of Joseph Morin Sr.’s birth, but not junior. “I guess you haven’t been born yet,” they told him. Morin ended up using a church baptismal record instead of a birth record and joined the crew for six years, leaving in 1938. At the time he left the project, he was making a whopping 92 cents an hour. Most of the general laborers earned 50 cents an hour. Frozen beds Another source for the film was Ivy Stebleton, who grew up in the boomtown of Wheeler. At age 6, she would run down to the Wheeler Motel and earn a quarter for making beds in the morning. Stebleton recalled mornings so cold that her mattress froze to the wall of their shack. She also told of the dark day when her brother returned home, skipping out on his usual stops at the pubs on his way home, to tell their mother about the slide that killed eight men. “Joe came home and told Mom, ‘I almost died today,’ ” Stebleton said. The slide, which occurred in 1938 when the dam and spillway were almost completed, scared everyone. Folks were running for the highest ground they could find, worried that the whole dam was going to break. A 2,000-foot-long section gave way because of a weakness in the 2 Copy obtained from the National Performance of Dams Program: http://npdp.stanford.edu bedrock the dam sits on, Sterling said. Fort Peck Dam remains the largest hydraulic filled earthen dam in the world. The other big dams of the era, Hoover and Grand Coulee, are constructed of concrete. Six men are entombed in the dam, and there is a memorial to them at the dam site. In all, 59 men were killed on the project. “The dam itself is just a huge pile of earth,” Sterling said. “It looks like a mountain. You don’t get the sense of it like you do with Hoover Dam. A lot of people go to the spillway and think that’s the dam. In fact, a Life magazine article misidentified the spillway as the dam.” The cover of Life Sterling was curious about life in the boom towns. The Life magazine article, an eight- page spread on Fort Peck Dam in the first issue of Life, was published on Nov. 23, 1936. It depicted the boomtowns as the Wild West, and some folks in the area were upset by that. Sterling was impressed with the structure in the towns. They had schools, stores and churches, in addition to the saloons that operated 24 hours a day. The Fort Peck Theater was built to entertain the workers, and movies were shown around the clock. The kitchens operated throughout the day, making 12,000 sandwiches a day to feed the workers. “They had a reputation for being the Wild West reborn, but at the same time, these were families who wanted a nice place to live. They weren’t Hoovervilles. They had streets and businesses, they weren’t just random shacks,” Sterling said. President Roosevelt visited the area twice, in 1934 and 1937, and Stebleton remembers getting to shake his hand. Few kitchens were without a calendar showing a photograph of Roosevelt. He was a popular president at Fort Peck. Another valuable source for the film was Lois Lonnquist, who wrote the book “50 Cents an Hour: The Building and Boomtowns of the Fort Peck Dam.” “She grew up in the boomtowns,” Sterling said. Powerful people One thing that struck Sterling was the strength of the people working on the project. “It seems different than it is now,” Sterling said. “The fact is we are in a recession. But these were people who wanted to do something. They wanted to work. They didn’t want to go on welfare. There were different attitudes than society has now.” Stebleton compared her family’s trip west to John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel “The Grapes of Wrath” because they had their sewing machine tied on top of their jalopy as they crept into the Fort Peck area. In the film, though, Stebleton said she was happy to grow up in a boomtown and was sad when the project was completed and their neighbors and friends all went their separate ways. Nobody had any more money than the next person and folks accepted that fact. (The impressive item in the article is that the pumps were made in Florida!) Red Bluff Diversion Dam replacement $190m project nears completion By Andrea Wagner -DN Staff Writer, redbluffdailynews.com, 05/19/2012 3 Copy obtained from the National Performance of Dams Program: http://npdp.stanford.edu About 20 people walked atop the massive fish screen structures of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam Fish Passage Improvement Project Thursday afternoon for a tour of the nearly complete facilities. The Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority could be delivering water into the canal from the Sacramento River as early as next week, said Bill Vanderwaal, the project manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, who helped lead the tour. The contractor is scheduled to finish the whole project, coming in under $190 million, in September, he said. The joint project between the Bureau of Reclamation and the canal authority began more than three years ago after a federal decision ordered the end of lowering the dam gates and the end of Lake Red Bluff. The Diversion Dam Fish Passage Improvement Project, in its final stages, is coming in on schedule and under the original budget estimates of $230 million. The new pumping facility is meant to screen the water, which will be pumped into the canal while allowing threatened and endangered salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon and other fish species to pass through to spawning grounds without disruption. The tour was a part of the Sacramento River Discovery Center's Thursday Evening program series. Bobie Hughes, the center's executive director began the evening with visual displays illustrating the history of the Diversion Dam and a photo album of pictures of the project since 2009. The tour began with a glance at the pumping station and electrical switchyard before attendees traipsed across the construction site in hardhats and neon vests. They walked across the top of the fish screens as Vanderwaal explained their construction. Workers were testing one of the nine Florida-made pumps as the tour group passed nearby. Workers were testing one of the nine Florida-made pumps as the tour group passed nearby. Some of the group commented that the steady hum of the pump was a welcome change to the sounds of construction heard in the past few years. The pumps will be able to pump at 2,000 cubic feet of water per second and can expand up to 2,500 cubic feet per second. At the end of the tour, guests were able to get an up close look at three fish screen panels that will be stored for spares. In all, 63 panels, 10-foot by 15-foot, span some 1,200 feet through the river's edge.

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