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Turner said. “When we breached the Eagle and Phenix dam, you could see the history of people thinking this river would be the next big thing, but then the river would say, ‘Not so fast, buddy.’ Wood dam, wood dam, wood dam, stone dam. Te river just kept saying, ‘I’m not going to cooperate.’” “It all goes back to the flow of the Chat-


tahoochee River,” Paul Meadows, project executive for West Point, Ga.-based Bat- son-Cook Construction, said. “She is in control all the time. No matter what you do, you can’t make her do something she doesn’t want to do.” Never having done work like this, Mead-


ows first thought the project might not be a good fit for his company. “What would happen if it rained for three months? Or what if we got a lot of work done and a flood came and washed it all away?” But he was intrigued and looked for solutions. One was teaming up with Scott Bridge Company of Opelika, to tap into their experience with building in water. Just getting into the river proved to be


one of the biggest challenges. Crews had to build temporary roads for their heavy equipment to reach different spots and then dismantle the roads when they were


done. “Sometimes it takes longer to build a road than it does to do the work,” Mead- ows said. Both Turner and Meadows were sur-


prised to find out how difficult one seem- ingly simple task turned out to be. “We spent a cold fortune trying to find out the true bottom of the river,” Turner said. “At first we thought, ‘if it’s hard, it must be the bottom.’ But that wasn’t true.” A quarry downstream of the Eagle and Phenix dam had carved channels at the river’s bottom, and over time, those channels filled up with loose rubble. The story of finally finding the true bot-


tom is one that will be retold for years. Turner got a call one day from a man who said he wanted to volunteer on the project. It turned out the caller, Ed Kinner, held a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and had worked on Boston’s Big Dig underwater highway project and on submarine plat- forms at sea. Turner tried to play it cool. “I think we can find something for you,” he told him. So Kinner and some divers from the


Chattahoochee Scuba Club set out to do what the pros had failed at. “I mean, we had side scan sonar, ground penetrating sonar,


physical surveys by crews from every- where,” Turner recalled, “and here is a guy in a john boat with a 50-foot tape measure from Ace Hardware and some volunteer scuba guys that found the true bottom of the river.” Of course there’s always red tape on a


project like this, especially since a good chunk of the funding came from the Corps of Engineers. “You don’t change a river this big and this important without hav- ing to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop,” Turner said. “You need contracts, permits, support from Native American tribes and historic preservation groups, environmental groups, two cities, two states … everyone has to be on board. Sometimes the slightest little thing can tie you in knots for months.” The work has turned up lots of pleasant


surprises, too, like the scads of free rocks that crews uncovered. “We thought we were going to have to buy boulders to build some of the structures,” Meadows said. “But once we got into the river with a track hoe, we started finding these great big, beautiful, feature boulders. We were able to harvest them from the riverbed and put them in different places. So we haven’t had


JUNE 2013


Columbus and the Valley


9


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