This history of a river basin has been repeated many times and it is only during the past thirty years that both environment and archaeology has been at least addressed. The present dispensation is actually unsatisfactory because land use is still planned in and then the environmental and archaeologic issues are addressed perhaps.
Obviously in this case a massive amount of damage was produced that has largely destroyed the record or at best buried it. Mostly buried i suspect.
All river basins need to be carefully and completely mapped prior to land use decisions. This will also lead to planned restorations and genral revoery and damage amelioration. Add in the natural village model for environmental trusteeship and the rule of twelve and all this can be mapped onto the whole Earth.
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Why the Chattahoochee-Flint-Apalachicola River System is in such a mess
The
Chattahoochee-Flint-Apalachicola River system has recently been named
the most endangered river system in the United States. That
designation, in itself, is an exaggeration and political ploy, but there
is no doubt that the destruction of the river system’s ecology, south
of Atlanta, was completed in the late 20th century. However, this war against Mother Nature began the moment the Creeks left and European-American settlers arrived.
A fact conveniently
forgotten by all parties concerned is that Alabama, Florida and Georgia
enthusiastically supported a massive US Army Corps of Engineers project
to convert the Apalachicola-Lower Chattahoochee River into what is
essentially today, a barge canal. While now professing deep concern for
the welfare of the lowly oyster, Florida officials formerly pressured
the Corps of Engineers to dredge the Apalachicola River to make it
navigable for larger vessels. They planned to develop the town of
Apalachicola into a major seaport.
Nevertheless, allowing
politicians and lawyers to divvy up the water resources, as if it was
their winnings from a successful court suit, will insure that the
situation in this river system will get worse and worse. Dividing up
water resources along political boundaries will do nothing to solve the
causes of ecological disaster. The causes are complex and transcend
political boundaries.
The Chattahoochee River begins at Unicoi Gap, east of Brasstown Bald
Mountain in Northeast Georgia. Just beyond the Nacoochee Valley, it
drops into an ancient fault gorge and flows southwestward in the fault
valley until reaching the Alabama line at Columbus, GA. From its source
to halfway through Metro Atlanta, the Chattahoochee is a sparkling,
white water river, where trout, swimmers and canoeists live in harmony.
The river leaves the Metro Atlanta area as silt ridden storm sewer.
Below Columbus, GA and Phenix City, AL, the Chattahoochee flows
almost due south through the Gulf Coastal Plain. It forms the boundary
between Alabama and Georgia. Along the way, a chain of late-20th
century reservoirs, built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, evaporate
an incalculably massive amount of water from the river system.
Big, bad Atlanta is blamed by Floridians for stealing their water,
but Metro Atlanta’s primary sin is turning the river into a sewer. It
is the reservoirs that steal their water . . . helped of course, by
agricultural irrigation systems in Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Yes,
it is the reservoirs that provide playgrounds for outboard moterboats
and fishermen . . . inflate the price of rural real estate . . . and
provide electricity for the citizens of Alabama, Florida and Georgia,
who are the water-gulping thieves . . . if one is looking for something
to villainize.
Near the point where Alabama, Florida and Georgia come together, the
Flint River joins the Chattahoochee to create the Apalachicola River.
From there, the Apalachicola flows generally southward to the Gulf of
Mexico. In Florida, the Apalachicola looks virtually identical to the
rivers in the Gulf Coastal Plain of Vera Cruz and Tabasco States in
Mexico. It is a slow, blackwater, sub-tropical river that is closely
bounded by dense vegetation.
The Flint River now begins as the polluted runoff from the Atlanta
International Airport, the world’s busiest. Its source is now buried
beneath runways constructed in the 1970s. Much of the path of the Flint
in the Piedmont is through wetlands that filter the stormwaters from
the Atlanta suburbs, which now essentially stretch all the way to Macon.
The Flint then crashes through a gap in Pine Mountain as a white
water river before soon reaching in the Gulf Coastal Plain. There it
slows down and meanders in the manner of many Coastal Plain rivers. In
the process, it picks up high loads of nitrates from farms and
occasional pollution outlets from rural industries that seem able to
avoid the EPA. Cities and towns along the way add to the sewage content
of the Flint River in the same manner of its big sister, the
Chattahoochee.
Destructive farming practices
The Chattahoochee, Flint and Apalachicola Rivers were our rivers
first. Rivers were the “interstate highways” that tied the Creek
Confederacy together. They also provided a bounty of food resources in
the form of fish, mussels, turtles and alligators. The annual flooding
of rivers coming out of the mountains rejuvenated the soils of the
bottom lands, enabling them to produce large crops without plows.
Prior to the taking of their land by Europeans, Creek surveyors
divided up bottom lands into rectangular tracts, sufficient in size to
support a household. In the boundaries between household tracts, it
was typical for fruit trees, nut trees, blackberries and raspberries to
grow. This is why you often see these feral plants growing along the
edge of Southern farm fields today. The boundary vegetation stabilized
the soil and usually prevented gullies from forming.
The rivers began to die as soon as the European newcomers stripped
the landscape to develop cotton plantations. After a few decades,
gullies began to form from the destructive erosion, which washed vast
amounts of clay and sand into the rivers. One in Southwest Georgia is
now called the “Little Grand Canyon.” Yes, the gullies are that big!
The Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers took on the color of red Southern
clay, mixed with milk, and have stayed that way much of the time for the
next century.
The environmentally destructive, European farming methods continued
to fill the river with silt and cause periodic flooding until the advent
of the Boll Weevil in the 1920s, which drove many farmers off the
landscape of Alabama, northern Florida and western Georgia. At this
point, most of the environmental damage was quickly reversible.
In fact, that is exactly what was happening. As can be seen in the
photo at the top of this article, the abandonment of marginal farms on
steep slopes in the 1920s caused the river to immediately return to its
clarity in the time of Native American ownership. That was not to last
long, however.
The first damming of the Chattahoochee River occurred immediately
prior to the American Civil War at Roswell, north of Atlanta, and at
Columbus, which along with Phenix City, is situated at the Fall Line.
In 1868, the Eagle and Phenix dam was constructed to supply power to a
textile mill. These dams were modest structures, which steered river
water at the top of shoals to turbines that ran industries. The
reservoirs behind these dams were small, since the main purpose of the
dams was to stabilize water flow. Nevertheless, they permanently stopped
the migration of shad and sturgeon in the Lower Chattahoochee and
Native Trout in the Upper Chattahoochee.
Atlanta was a pioneer in electric streetcars. Although Richmond, VA
gets the credit for the first practical, operating electric trolley, in
reality, Atlanta had the first citywide system and it quickly ran out of
electricity. The small, initial power plants were near upscale
Victorian neighborhoods east of downtown.
The nouveaux riche objected to the coal smoke, so the forerunner of
the Georgia Power Company began constructing dams and hydroelectric
plants on rivers in mountainous North Georgia. The first one, in 1904,
was at Morgan Falls on the Chattahoochee River in Roswell, now part of
Metro Atlanta. It had a relatively small reservoir, but caused that
section of the river valley to become wetlands. The construction of
these dams gave Atlanta, what was then considered to be the most
technically advanced, cost efficient trolley and street lighting system
in the nation.
Then in 1926, North Georgia experienced a severe drought. Georgia
Power Company was forced to create the first interstate electrical grid
in the United States in order to purchase power from neighboring states
that relied on coal-fired electric plants.
The management of the Georgia Power Company was embarrassed and so
began planning a network of coal-fired plants. They built Plant
Atkinson on the Chattahoochee River near the Atlanta-Smyrna Highway and
the site of the Creek town, Standing Peachtree. Until that time, as can
be seen in the photo above, the Chattahoochee River Valley had a
pristine, natural environment, worthy of a national park.
Once Plant Atkinson was built in 1930, dirty industries began to
cluster along the river near it. The City of Atlanta built a water
intake and treatment plant upstream from the power plant and a sewage
dump station downstream. With no environmental laws in effect, the
municipal and industrial facilities dumped their waste directly into the
river. The same land use changes occurred when a coal-fired plant was
built in Columbus, GA.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was the Roosevelt Administration’s
largest experiment in socialism and it was a grand success. Initially,
the TVA was not just a power producer, but also a regional planning,
road construction, cultural development, healthcare agency. During the
Depression, federally funded nurses made house calls in the valley.
They even delivered babies and fixed broken bones.
When the TVA first moved into Knoxville, over a third of the people
in the Upper Tennessee River Valley had malaria. Even in the late
1970s, the TVA maintained a large staff of regional and city planners,
who assisted communities in Eastern Tennessee and Western North
Carolina.
After World War II, politicians in other Southern states saw how the
TVA quickly changed Eastern Tennessee and wanted on the band wagon.
However, the US Army Corps of Engineers was given responsibility for
building a network of hydroelectric dams and riverine transportation
systems. The conservative Southern politicos did not want the feds to
have more regional authorities.
The Corps of Engineers initially proposed to build a chain of dams on
the Chattahoochee River from the mountains to the sea. The Nacoochee
Valley, with all its incredible historic resources and natural beauty,
was to become a lake. Fortunately, the success of the movie, “I’d Climb
the Highest Mountain” in 1951 brought the attention of the valley to
the nation, so politicos were shamed into dropping plans for a dam
there. However, construction quickly began on Lake Lanier, whose
northern end was at the foot of the mountains.
When completed in 1956, Lake Lanier was the largest man-made
reservoir in the world. Oddly enough, Atlanta was forbidden from
drawing water from it, so the Morgan Falls Dam was rebuilt much higher
to allow for an Atlanta water intake. Gainesville had only 16,000
residents when the dam was built, but soon was exploding in population
and legally drawing water from the lake. Gainesville now has its own
metropolitan area, which is really an extension of Atlanta Metro.
The Corps of Engineers then embarked on a plan to convert the
southern half of the Chattahoochee-Apalachicola River System into a
highly manipulated riverine transportation system. Politicians and
economic development leaders in Alabama, Florida and Georgia believed
the Corps’ projections of a flood of barge traffic on the
Apalachicola-Chattahoochee River that would turn Apalachicola, Florida
into an important seaport and the Columbus-Phenix City Area into a major
metropolis.
Economic justifications for the three large dams on the Lower
Chattahoochee were based on the assumed impact of freight barge
traffic. Because of the flat terrain, vast tracts of very fertile
bottom land were bought by the US Government and covered with water.
For unknown reasons, the Corps of Engineers never entered the cost of
lost agricultural production into their cost-benefit formulas.
It was also necessary to build the dams much larger than necessary
for power generation in order to make the water deep enough for barge
traffic. The larger surface areas of the lakes then magnified the
amount water lost each year to evaporation.
The Apalachicola River was dredged all the way to Georgia. The dams
and locks were built. Then there was nothing . . . nada. No one ever
considered what demand there might be for any items that might be
carried in bulk up the river. The region was already served by trunk
petroleum lines. The railroads were closing down spurs due to lack of
business. By 2006, the Apalachicola Bay oysters had suddenly become
important to Florida officials again.
Explosive growth and Ill-conceived land use planning in Metro Atlanta
When Lake Lanier was being built, Metro Atlanta’s population was
about 726,000. It is now about 6 million. There are over another
million people in Georgia, who are dependent on the Chattahoochee River
for their public water systems. Most of that water goes back into the
river as sewage, but the river is reaching its maximum point for being a
water source. The combined Atlanta and Gainesville Metropolitan Areas
completely wrap around Lake Lanier. Metro Atlanta extends to the foot
of the Blue Ridge Mountains and stretches southward about 125 miles.
\
Yes, Georgia is a very different place than what Corps of Engineers
planners studied in the late 1940s, yet 70 year old engineering studies
and legal agreements for Lake Lanier have been used as the basis for
court proceedings during the past ten years of legal arguments fought
between Alabama, Florida and Georgia. Journalists covering these legal
jousts rarely mention that the portion of Georgia’s population, which is
dependent on the Chattahoochee River for water, vastly exceeds the
combined population of the State of Alabama and the entire Florida
Panhandle.
Throughout the 1940s to the
early 1970s, a primary function of Atlanta Regional Planning Commission
was to force the expansion of predominantly black neighborhoods in a
southwesterly direction.
While the City of Atlanta was still under the complete control of a nouveaux riche,
white elite, it billed itself as “the city too busy to hate.” There
was another story beneath this façade. Atlanta enthusiastically adopted
city planning because it provided a legal means to dodge
anti-segregation rulings by the US Supreme Court. Thinking that its
“Colored” citizens would mainly hold menial jobs, industrial and
warehouse developments were steered to the southwest toward the
Chattahoochee River, while the MARTA rapid transit system was initially
designed to bring white executives from Buckhead to Downtowns and
“Colored” maids from immediately south and west of Downtown Atlanta to
Buckhead.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a vast territory along the
Chattahoochee River Floodplain in Southwest Metro Atlanta was rezoned
from agriculture to industrial-warehouse usage. No thoughts whatsoever
were given to the potential impact downstream of such a vast area being
converted from a semi-natural state to hard paving and building roofs.
There were no national environmental standards or flood hazard area
construction laws. All stormwater went straight into streams or storm
sewers then into the Chattahoochee River. Stormwater flowing over
paving often contained high levels of petrochemical toxins. Worse still
was the water flowing over the grounds of chemical and electronic
plants.
In the early 1960s, Texas developer Trammel Crow, proposed to build a
spin-off of Six Flags Over Texas and his Great Southwest Industrial
Park in Dallas, along the Chattahoochee River near Interstate 20 in
Metro Atlanta. An astonishing 6,234 acres were to be converted from
flood plain agricultural usage to industry, warehouses, an amusement
park and a business executive oriented airport.
Atlanta’s leadership jumped all over themselves to make the
investment from Texas possible. The land was re-zoned in advance
without review of site plans. No retention of storm water was
required. Crow was allowed to pile up to 25 feet of red Georgia clay
over the flood prone landscape to make it developable. As the project’s
construction progressed, communities all the way down the
Chattahoochee-Apalachicola River Basin began to feel the impact. Flash
floods became more frequent as Metro Atlanta’s natural capacity to
absorb rain water was flushed downstream.
Of course, there was no thought to historic preservation concerns.
In 1939, archaeologist Robert Wauchope, discovered one of the densest
concentrations of Native American towns sites in North America along the
Chattahoochee River in the very same area in which massive commercial
developments were proposed. His book was not published until 1966, but
at least some archaeologists were aware of some of these sites. Six
Flags Over Georgia was built on a Creek town site, named Chattahoochee,
with four mounds. Earth grading workers carried Native American bones
home as souvenirs. All but one of the other village sites were covered
with a deep layer of red clay between 1968 and 1970.
Only the Buzzard Island Archaeological Site remains because of being
in the center of the river, no profit can be made by developing it into a
warehouse.
And now you know.
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