I've got a bad feeling about this.

How so?

I was a little curious about the condition of the dams. They are really old. Here are some pics of Santeelah. It's pretty rough. There are visible leaks.

In the Brookfield press release they say the the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave Tapoco a 40 year operating license in 2005. Hard to imagine these lasting that long without major repairs.

If my math on the back of a napkin is right, the retail value of the power is about $120 million a year. They are wholesaling it to TVA so maybe they get half of that which means they get their money back in about ten years not allowing for operating costs, interest and future value and whatnot. Sounds like a pretty good investment, as long as there aren't any major problems with the dams. In that case, you wonder if they would have the resources to fix them.

My concern lies with the watershed management. The four lakes in question are currently managed on a more or less full pool basis, that is to say, they are managed as cold water reservoirs. I am not aware of a mandate compelling Alcoa to do so, it just made sense on virtually all levels within their agreement with TVA.

If they are going to be managed to push quarterly profits, there will be damage to the watershed's fisheries. The four lakes in question have a steelhead effect on the streams feeding them, so the possibility of real damage to the now native brood stock on the Slickrock and Santeelah watersheds, as well as Cheowah, Abrams Creek, Panther Creek etc.

I don't know what is going to happen, but short of taking the dams out, current watershed management, at least from what I've seen, appears to be best practice. In this case, I fear change.

I believe we may be looking at the end of the last, best place on earth.

By disconnecting their home grown power supply which originally drove the aluminum smelting operations, we may have seen the end of the Alcoa aluminum production facilities as we knew them.

There may be nothing left over there but the aluminum can operations, aluminum sheets rolled in, aluminum cans trucked out.

It's the dam Harrison Ford dives off of in "The Fugitive."

It's not all peaches and cream here. There are rumors of some rather large deposits of hazardous wastes at the bottom of Chilhowee Lake, and , during the last draw down for dam maintenance a cache of barrels was discovered around the mouth of Abrams Creek. According to local legend, the mother load is actually below Calderwood dam. Just sayin.

The way it will work, in a nutshell, is this. Brookfield owns the dams, the Fed (that's us) owns the water, the deeded landowner owns the land and the two states own the fish and game. There are many more chips in the game than there were when Alcoa owned the land and dams and had a sweetheart deal on the water which they managed in a manner that appeared (on the surface anyway) to benefit the fish.

Stay tuned.

(link...)

Neither Calderwood nor Chilhowee is on this list. I no longer recommend taking a canoe to Calderwood because until there is some measure of traffic control on 129 a motorcycle enema is a distinct possibility. The fishing is great though.

Here's Tapoco's license renewal and operating plan from 2005. It gives a detailed overview of the operations, discharges, fisheries management, etc. (warning: large PDF, right click and "download as" to save a copy if you prefer):

FERC Project No. 2169-020

EDIT: This is the license they are currently operating under and that will presumably transfer to Brookfield.

Maryville Daily Times has some interesting background on the Tapoco sale.

For example, I did not know that Fontana was originally going to be another Tapoco dam until TVA took over the project by eminent domain for the war effort.

It's hard to imagine Alcoa building something on the scale of Fontana (isn't it the largest dam east of the Mississippi?). Perhaps they had something smaller in mind?

This could turn out to be a good thing.

Norris was TVA's first dam completed on the Tennessee River System and Fontana is a similar straight gravity dam with no locks or other passage components for anything other than water and remains the largest dam in the Eastern United States even today.

Norris was the primary electricity provider to the Manhattan Project in Anderson and Roane counties through August, 1945.

Not sure there is anything good about TVA acquiring anything from private enterprises or private citizens anymore, but if Alcoa is not going to continue to operate their power assets, I guess TVA is the only logical purchaser.