Surveying
In 1944, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers considered building a bridge across Rampart Gorge as part of a project to extend the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Nome to facilitate Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union during World War II. The war ended before the project got beyond the planning stages, and the bridge idea was scrapped.
As early as 1948, U.S. Government officials eyed the Rampart site for its hydroelectric potential. A report by Joseph Morgan, chief of the Alaska Investigations Office for the United States Bureau of Reclamation declared, "The demand for electric power supply in the Territory is expanding so rapidly that new installations of hydroelectric power plants are needed." Morgan's report listed 72 potential hydroelectric power sites in Alaska, but the Rampart site was one of the few to have a potential capacity of more than 200,000 kilowatts.
In his report, Morgan addresses the potential of the site:
Reconnaissance topography indicates several potential dam sites in Lower Ramparts, but the best site probably will be found about 31 miles (50 km) downstream from the village of Rampart. ... this site on the Yukon River would easily be one of the major potential hydroelectric power developments in North America.
Read more about this topic: Rampart Dam
Famous quotes containing the word surveying:
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)