The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project: An Oral History of the Greatest Construction Show on Earth

Introduction

xxiii Introduction awesome! breathtaking! A feat of modern engineering! These are some of the words people exclaim as they overlook the Robert Moses– Robert H. Saunders Dam, which straddles the U.S.–Canadian border. The 3,216-foot-long, 195.5-foot-high structure was the focal point of the billion-dollar St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, the largest waterway and hydrodam ever constructed jointly by two nations. Planners had scheduled the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and power dam to take seven years; however, ship captains navigated the new waterway and the turbines rotated only four years after Robert Moses, chairman of the Power Authority of the State of New York (PASNY), had dug the first chrome spadeful of dirt at the 1954 ground-breaking ceremony. The project was the most important public works initiative of the Eisenhower administration and the Cold War. The completed inland waterway protected ships and submarines in the event of an attack, and the power dam provided a new source of electricity for American and Canadian residents and manufacturers. M. W. Oettershagen, deputy administrator of the Seaway Development Corporation in 1959, dubbed the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project “the greatest construction show on earth.” Consisting of seven locks, the widening of various canals, and the taming of rapids, the 265-mile Seaway project between Alexandria Bay, New York, and Montreal, Canada, fulfilled politicians’ and engineers’ century-long dreams of linking the Great Lakes interior industrial hubs in the United States to the Atlantic Ocean. Rivaling the great dam and waterway projects of the 1920s, the Seaway introduced new state-of-the-art equipment and required the participation of the seven largest U.S. contractors and 22,000 carpenters, engineers, and xxiv   |   Introduction laborers. Ontario Hydro and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) employees toiled for decades conducting soil testing, building models, and designing locks and dams. In his May 1959 report entitled St. Lawrence Seaway—Fact and Future, Oettershagen concluded that during the construction between 1954 and 1958, there had been a “deployment of an estimated $75 million in on-site equipment, the placing of more than six million cubic yards of concrete and the dredging and excavation of 360 million tons of materials.”1 William Willoughby, author of The St. Lawrence Waterway: A Study in Politics and Diplomacy, asserted that the waterway and hydroelectric facility project was one of the most incredible engineering and construction jobs ever attempted.2 The construction of the numerous project sites presented the employees of Uhl, Hall, and Rich, the project managers for PASNY, and the Corps, the agency in charge of completing the locks and dredging on the American side of the project, with many logistical dilemmas. The short lag time between the proposal of the Wiley-Dondero Act in 1951 and the commencement of excavation in 1954 prevented designers from preparing final detailed drawings and scientists from completing comprehensive test borings. Therefore, for the next four years, these entities and their contractors faced a record number of change orders and design modifications , and encountered clay, glacial till, and rocks on all of the construction and dredging sites that destroyed machinery and bankrupted excavation contractors. Contractors also did not anticipate how the extreme weather conditions would adversely impact workers, equipment, and concrete. During the dredging of the power pool and new navigational route, Ontario Hydro and Corps river engineers additionally had to maintain a consistent water level to prevent cofferdams from washing away and to allow uninterrupted use of the existing shipping channels. Eleanor Dumas, a newspaper reporter during the construction, recollected , “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ . . . Looking back over thirty years since the groundbreaking for what was then the world’s largest construction project, the best of times came for the hard workers, the money makers and the achievers. . . . The worst to those people on each side of the St. Lawrence River who mourned the loss of their old cemeteries and the Long Sault Rapids. . . . The initial work started Introduction   |   xxv unobtrusively.” However, she then noted, as the excavators cleared lock and dam sites, “the earth turned into a terror scene” as engineers encountered unfamiliar substances that “machines found hard to penetrate.”3 In a June 26, 1958, article in the Chicago Daily News, a reporter compared the St. Lawrence Seaway dimensions and construction, excluding the hydroelectric project, with the forty-four...