Copyright, 1949
by
ROBERT SPARKS WALKER
Price 50 Cents
Companion Book:
THIS IS CHATTANOOGA
Price 75 Cents
Printed and bound in the United States of America
The Chickamauga Dam
and Its Environs
Well, here we are, standing on the top of a huge pile of concrete 129 feet above the ground floor, about seven miles from the center of Chattanooga.
What a beautiful body of water it is that spreads before us to the east! It is a lovely creation. I think you will agree that its shoreline warrants its claim to as much beauty as the water itself. Really, I find it so inviting that I would like to join you in a hike all the way along its many little peninsulas, capes, inlets and tiny bays, halting long enough to see the loveliest wild flowers, vines, trees and birds, especially the waterfowls which have been attracted here chiefly because they find good fishing. Suppose we pause a moment and do a little figuring. If we should walk twenty miles each day, it would take us forty days to walk around the shoreline of this lake. On our way up the river, fifty-nine miles from here, we would walk directly into the Watts Bar Dam. There we would cross over to descend the east side of the Chickamauga Lake. While we were at Watts Bar Dam, surely some person would tell us that seventy-two miles farther upstream is the Fort Loudon Dam, whose waters back up as far as Knoxville, Tennessee, a city that is 650 miles from where the Tennessee empties into the Ohio. By the time we had walked back to our starting point, we would have trekked 810 miles.
If the water that is now passing by could talk so we could understand, some of it would tell us that it has come from storage dams that have been built on the tributaries of the Tennessee River. The dams thus reporting would be, Hiwassee, Norris, Fontana, Cherokee, Douglas, Ocoee, Apalachia and Chatuge. The TVA also has control of the water of the following five dams of the Aluminum Company of America: Calderwood, Cheoah, Glenville, Nantahala, and Santeetlah.
What do you really see here? Briefly, there are a navigation lock 60 by 360 feet, a concrete spillway, a concrete powerhouse intake section, a concrete bulkhead section, and an earth embankment on each side. It calls for a long stretch of the legs to walk from one end to the other. The spillway section which includes eighteen piers, is 864 feet long. The eighteen gates are forty feet wide and forty feet high. The earth embankment to our left on the north side, is 1,390 feet in length; the embankment on our right, or south side, is 3,000 feet long. The total length is approximately 5,800 feet or a little more than a mile.
The spillway section has a width of eighty-two feet at its base. Including the apron, its width increases to a hundred and twenty-five feet. The power station with its three units has a generating capacity of 81,000 kilowatts. There are three hydraulic turbines, and one more can be added.
The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933, passed by Congress, gave power to the board to construct dams in the Tennessee River. Accordingly, the TVA began work on the Chickamauga Dam, January 13, 1936. The project was finished January 31, 1941, or five years after the work was started. The filling of the reservoir was begun January 15, 1940. In that time 2,510,800 cubic yards of earth were handled and 491,800 cubic yards of concrete poured. The total cost of constructing the Chickamauga Dam, including the cost of acquiring all the lands, totaled thirty-eight million dollars.