Earth & places · Inventions & technology

The Lake Erie-sized lake Alaska came close to building on purpose

In the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans for a colossal dam across the Yukon River at Rampart Canyon in Alaska, meant to generate several gigawatts of hydroelectric power from a reservoir roughly the size of Lake Erie. Backed by figures like Senator Ernest Gruening and even presidential candidates Kennedy and Nixon, the project was pitched as Alaska's answer to the Tennessee Valley Authority, promising cheap electricity that would supposedly lure aluminum smelters, pulp mills, and tourism to a sparsely populated territory. Preliminary studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s estimated costs climbing from $900 million toward $1.2 billion, and engineers even considered using nuclear explosives to speed up excavation work. Boosters formed lobbying groups, state legislators lined up in support, and the Corps pressed ahead with surveys, drilling, and economic studies throughout the decade.

Opposition grew steadily from three directions. Conservationists warned that flooding the Yukon Flats wetlands would devastate breeding grounds for millions of ducks and geese, along with salmon runs and fur-bearing mammals, a case laid out forcefully by the Fish and Wildlife Service and amplified in magazines like Audubon and Sports Illustrated. Alaska Native communities objected to the certain loss of nine villages and the forced relocation of roughly 1,500 people, including residents of Fort Yukon, one of the territory's oldest settlements, and organized groups specifically to fight the project. Economists such as Michael Brewer challenged the rosy industrial projections, arguing the dam would not pay for itself and that Alaska lacked any real competitive advantage to attract energy-hungry industries, prompting critics elsewhere to brand it a costly giveaway to a single state.

Faced with this pressure, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall formally opposed the dam in 1967, effectively killing it even though the Corps of Engineers finished its full engineering study years later and reaffirmed in 1978 that the project no longer made sense. President Jimmy Carter sealed its fate by creating protections for the Yukon Flats that made any such flooding impossible, and the land set aside for construction was finally released for other uses in the mid-1980s. Beyond its own cancellation, the fight over Rampart Dam helped reshape the environmental movement by linking ecological concerns to the human cost of development, and it gave Alaska Native groups organizing experience and networks that resurfaced soon after in opposition to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

The Army Corps kept working on the engineering study for years after the Interior Secretary formally killed the dam in 1967, finishing it in 1971 and releasing the final report only in 1979.

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