Reputed as much, if not more, for their political and legal maneuvering than their interests in truly balancing their clearly stated mission to remove the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam (reference Savannah RiverKeeper website: “With our Rock the Dam campaign, SRK advocates for the replacement of the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam with a rock weir.”), can a court truly determine that they should be allowed to join the plaintiff’s lawsuit that opposes its removal?
Given the rain events of the past few months, it should be clear to anyone with any remote sense of logic that, if a weir structure were in place today, that the river at downtown Augusta and North Augusta, would be getting shallower via the accretion of measurable silt buildup behind the weir by the minute.
To cite an article from the International Rivers relating to sediment problems with dams, “Sediment flows vary widely both annually and seasonally over time – far more than water flows – and so calculating an annual average needs a long run of data. According to Mahmood, dam planners should ideally have sediment statistics going back over a period equal to at least half the projected life of the dam… sedimentation is still probably the most serious technical problem faced by the dam industry.”
Despite the RiverKeeper’s mission to return the river to its natural state, how is it not clear that what they have proposed, and nearly accomplished with the NSBL&D is to remove a functional manmade dam that has the functional capacity to eliminate sediment build-up via a dam structure with gates that can be lifted out of the water during heavy flow periods. Instead, they are proposing a replacement (also manmade, by the way) that maintains the illusion of a more natural river feature, but is in actuality a non-functioning dam that will precipitate an upstream river which will become shallower and shallower with every single rain event and, eventually create a maintenance burden that exponentially eclipses any maintenance associated with what we have now.
A “weir” is, by definition, a dam. “A weir /wɪər/ or low head dam is a barrier across the width of a river that alters the flow characteristics of water and usually results in a change in the height of the river level. There are many designs of weir, but commonly water flows freely over the top of the weir crest before cascading down to a lower level.” But unlike a restored NSBL&D, we have all been duped to think that we would be eliminating an unnatural obstruction for something natural; but in actuality is only design to look natural.
The Corp has created maintenance cost estimates for a repaired NSBL&D that dauntingly support their final proposal but have no statistical support that we have seen. Where is their study about sedimentation statistics with regard to the immovable weir? How much time before North Augusta, South Augusta and local industries are sucking mud into their water treatment facilities? How much time before the river “silts-up” behind a weir when the channel capacity is clogged to the extent that the emergency overflow in alternative 2-6d becomes the channel? What is the cost burden to continually dredge the upstream river to avoid this? What is the cost burden to landowners related to the ecological condemnation of properties associated with a floodplain line that increases at a rate equal to the decrease is flow volume associated with increases in sediment.”
The Savannah RiverKeeper’s position supports this inevitability? This is the reality They simply cannot be allowed to interfere with the goals of the plaintiffs to avoid this potential catastrophe for our cities. In today’s world, who knows?