Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell by John Wesley Powell

Author:John Wesley Powell [Powell, John Wesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, General, Environmental Conservation & Protection, animals, Mammals, science, Environmental Science
ISBN: 9781559638722
Google: V9t5AAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2001-07-01T23:41:38.177519+00:00

SELECTION 10

The Lesson of Conemaugh

The horrors of the 1889 Johnstown Flood intensified public mistrust of all kinds of dam construction, and opponents of reclamation heightened their criticism of policies that would stimulate construction of irrigation reservoirs. Here is Powell’s response.

The experiences of civilization teach many lessons that go unheeded until some great disaster comes as an object-lesson to recall to men’s minds things known but half forgotten. The Conemaugh disaster belongs to this category. For more than four thousand years civilized men have been constructing reservoirs in which to store water for various purposes. The conditions to be fulfilled in their construction are well known, for the lesson has been enforced upon mankind from the dawn of civilization to the present time by disasters too many to be enumerated.

Hydraulic engineering is the oldest scientific art. No other can compare with it in this respect, except that of architecture in its application to the building of temples and pyramids; but scientific engineering is even older than scientific architecture. Everywhere throughout the world civilization began in arid lands, and hydraulic engineering was the first great problem to be solved; and for this reason it was solved at an early time, and well solved. Something has been added through the years, but not much. In our own times these problems have come to be of far greater importance than they were in antiquity, and the civilized world has now reached the dawn of a day of hydraulic engineering of such magnitude that all the works hitherto accomplished are insignificant compared to those now to be planned and executed. Let the significance of this statement be briefly set forth.

North American Review 149 (1889): 150–156.

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