lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet--so they would grow very
much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast
them with TNT or maybe nuclear warheads? Well, doubtless we would, but consider this.
In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with
200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost
3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage
fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it
glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None.
Just beyond the pond was a side trail, the Garvey Springs Trail, which descended very
steeply to an old paved road along the river, just below a spot called Tocks Island and
which would take me in a lazy loop back towards the visitor center where I had left the
car. It was four miles and the day was growing warm, but the road was shaded and quiet-
-I saw only three cars in an hour or so--so it was a pleasant stroll, with restful views of
the river across overgrown meadows.
By American standards, the Delaware is not a particularly imposing waterway, but it
has one almost unique characteristic. It is nearly the last significant undammed river in
the United States. Now this might seem an inestimable virtue--a river that runs as nature
planned it. However, one consequence of its unregulated nature is that the Delaware
regularly floods. In 1955, as Frank Dale notes in his excellent book Delaware Diary, there
was a flood that even now is remembered as "the Big One." In August of that year--
ironically at the height of one of the most severe droughts in decades--two hurricanes hit
North Carolina one after the other, disrupting and enlivening weather all up and down the
East Coast. The first dumped ten inches of rain in two days on the Delaware River Valley.
Six days later the valley received ten inches in less than twenty-four hours. At a place
called Camp Davis, a holiday complex, forty-six people, mostly women and children, took
refuge from the rising flood waters in the camp's main building. As the waters rose, they
fled first upstairs and then into the attic, but to no avail. Sometime in the night a thirty-
foot wall of water came roaring through the valley and swept the house away. Amazingly,
nine people survived.
Elsewhere, bridges were being brushed aside and riverside towns inundated. Before the
day was out, the Delaware River would rise forty-three feet. By the time the waters finally
receded, 400 people were dead and the whole of the Delaware Valley was devastated.
Into this gooey mess stepped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a plan to build a
dam at Tocks Island, very near where I was walking now. The dam, according to the
Corps' plan, would not only tame the river but allow the creation of a new national park,
at the heart of which would be a recreational lake almost forty miles long. Eight thousand
residents were moved out. It was all done very clumsily. One of the people evicted was
blind. Several farmers had only parts of their land bought, so that they ended up with
farmland but no house or a farmhouse but no land. A woman whose family had farmed
the same land since the eighteenth century was carried from her house kicking and
bellowing, to the delight of newspaper photographers and film crews.
The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don't build things very well. A
dam across the Missouri River in Nebraska silted up so disastrously that a noisome ooze
began to pour into the town of Niobrara, eventually forcing its permanent abandonment.
Then a Corps dam in Idaho failed. Fortunately it was in a thinly populated area and there
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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