July122009
Dam It, Norris
Leaving Norris, I drove a few miles up the road to Norris Dam, the first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. FDR passed the TVA Act, one of the most important acts of his first hundred days, in May, 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. Completed three years later, the dam was named after George Norris, a Nebraska senator who had been advocating a public power authority in the southeast for decades. The TVA was supposed to do a lot of things: provide cheap power to people in the valley (many of whom had never had electricity), make the Tennessee River and its tributaries navigable (which would help end the region’s economic isolation), and control flooding (a scourge of local farmers), among other things. Norris Dam was a huge first step toward all of these goals. It began generating power on July 28, 1936 and now has a capacity of over 100 megawatts. The TVA went on to build nearly thirty dams in the valley over the next four decades.
When Norris Dam’s design was debuted at an exbition in New York’s MOMA, the engineer Stuart Chase called it “a new architecture, bold as the engineering from which it springs…Look at it, and be proud you are an American.” Norris is still an impressive sight from afar, rising 265 feet above the Clinch River. Up close, it begins to show its age.
From the TVA website: “Hydropower is America’s leading renewable energy resource. Of all the renewable power sources, it’s the most reliable, efficient, and economical.” But by the 1940s, coal had begun to eclipse hydropower as the authority’s main source of electricity. A plaque in Norris Dam’s visitor center boasts that “dams like this” supply 11% of TVA power. Today, hydro is in third place on the list of TVA power sources: 60% cromes from coal and 30% from nuclear.
