Geographical Surgery Gives the U.S. & Canada a New Artery

THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY

WHILE a sharp summer thunderstorm crackled across the St. Lawrence Valley, crowds of raincoated tourists scrambled to the crest of a high dirt dike near Cornwall. Ont. one morning last week and peered through the mist toward a stubby earthen dam 2 1/2miles away. At 7:55 a warning rocket arched overhead, and a voice on a loudspeaker began a countdown. An engineer in a timbered bunker pressed a button; from the explosive-mined dam a yellow curtain of debris belched upward toward the thunderheads. Deliberately, the blasted dam crumbled, and muddy water poured through, first in a thick stream, then in a torrent.

Thus on Dominion Day, the 91st anniversary of Canada's confederation, the big neighbors of North America thunderously marked completion of the major works in the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project (see color pages). For three days the unstopped waters of the St. Lawrence rushed into the basin above the international St. Lawrence Power Dam, and on July 4, Independence Day for Canada's U.S. partner in the project, the newborn lake reached its predicted shore line. Turbines in the power dam turned in test runs, and the U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender Maple voyaged through the new lake, planting a trail of red and black buoys to mark the way for 80 ships waiting to follow--and for the thousands to come after the deep seaway's opening next April.

The key to the seaway's significance lies in a single figure: 27 ft. When the builders complete a channel that deep, 80% of the world's cargo ships will be able to steam--with at least a few inches of water under their keels--into any port along the Great Lakes' 8.300-mile shore line. Cities in the great Midwest of the U.S. will become ocean-going ports. Chicago will be linked to Calcutta, Duluth to Antwerp, Toronto to Brisbane. Detroit's Chrysler Corp. will be able to ship a Plymouth sedan to Oslo for $45 less than the cost of the rail-ocean haul through New York. Wheat will move from Fort William, Ont. to Rotterdam at a saving of up to 15-c- per bu.

Already the seaway's impact has been felt far and wide:

P: The Dutch-owned Oranje Line this week launches the Princess Margriet, designed to carry 110 passengers and mixed cargo into the Great Lakes.

P: Industries using cheap St. Lawrence power are going up to provide 2,000 new jobs in Massena. N.Y.

P: Since seaway construction started in 1954, Cook County (Chicago) Congressmen have twice voted unanimously to extend the tariff-chopping Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act.

The Magnificent River. The St. Lawrence is one of the world's great rivers. It drains an area larger than Great Britain and France, carries to the sea more water than the Seine, the Danube and the Thames combined. Filtered through the five Great Lakes, its steel blue waters normally run free of silt. The stages of the river rarely vary more than 7 ft., and its maximum now is only twice its minimum --bonus factors for hydroelectric development. Yet power engineers surveyed its upper reaches for half a century in hungry frustration; for even longer, navigators eyed it as a barrier and an opportunity.

The taming of the turbulent St. Lawrence has occupied as many as 22,000 men and fleets of machines for four years. In cost, $1,090,000,000, the seaway and power project will likely stand as the world's most ambitious bit of geographical surgery until men tunnel under the English Channel; by a wide margin it is the biggest task two nations ever undertook in peacetime partnership.

Passage to the East. First white man to glimpse the river was the Breton explorer, Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the gulf on the day of the feast of St. Lawrence, Aug. 10, 1535. Cartier tacked his flagship Grande Hermine 560 miles up the narrowing river, hoping against reason to see it open out into the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient. Instead, he found foaming rapids near present-day Montreal.

As early as 1700, French fur traders and missionaries detoured Lachine by way of a narrow canal just deep enough to float freight canoes. In 1908 Canada completed a series of locks and canals able to carry ships no deeper than 14 ft. from Montreal to Lake Ontario. Earlier, Ottawa and Washington had opened talks that were to drag on for decades, seeking a way for the joint development of the upper river for power and deep-draft navigation. Every President from Wilson to Eisenhower supported the seaway; so did every Prime Minister in Ottawa from Robert Borden on.

Pressure on the Dike. In the U.S. the seaway counted a formidable line-up of foes. The Eastern railways, the Atlantic seaports, the South, coal-mining interests and private-power producers all fought it. New developments gradually wore them down.

Midwestern steelmakers with heavy investments in Labrador iron ore needed a low-cost waterway to haul ore to their mills. Power-hungry New York State won permission from Washington to develop the U.S.'s share of St. Lawrence power at New York's expense. Power-hungry Ontario kept up pressure on Ottawa; so did prairie wheatgrowers and lake port interests. In 1953 the Liberal government in Ottawa politely bypassed a 21-year-old seaway agreement that Congress had refused to ratify, declared its intention to go ahead with the seaway alone.

That did it. With renewed prodding from the Eisenhower Administration, Congress rushed through the Wiley-Dondero bill for a full U.S. partnership in a seaway that would pay for itself in tolls in 50 years. Canada readily agreed to the new terms.

On with the Job. After the politicians finally acted, the engineers moved swiftly. Their job: to gouge out a ship channel with a minimum depth of 27 ft. from the harbor at Montreal, which is 22 ft. above sea level, to Lake Ontario, 182 miles to the southwest and 224 ft. higher. Midway they would tap the power potential of the great International Rapids.

In the province of Quebec they had to build 20 miles of new channel and two new locks to bypass Lachine Rapids, enlarge 16 miles of channel and two more locks at the rapids at Beauharnois. Sluggish, shallow Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Francis--wide places in the St. Lawrence River--were dredged to seaway depth.

At the eastern end of the International Rapids, where the brawling river forms the boundary between Ontario and New York, two new dams went up--the dams that last week drowned the old rapids under a navigable lake 28 miles long and up to four miles wide. One was the St. Lawrence Power Dam. The other, the Long Sault (pronounced soo) Spillway Dam, stands across the old main river bed to divert water to the power dam and a bypass ship channel.

The bypass is the only major seaway works in U.S. territory. Going upstream from Lake St. Francis, ships will move into the Wiley-Dondero Ship Channel, rise a total of 90 ft. in the Snell Lock and the Eisenhower Lock ("Ike's dike," in seaway slang), pass on into the new, still unnamed lake. At the western end of the lake, a 5-ft. lift in Ontario's Iroquois Lock will hoist westbound ships into the calm waters of the upper St. Lawrence for easy steaming upstream to Lake Ontario.

Four Bosses. The administration of the seaway and power project looks clumsy--but has worked fine. The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and the Power Authority of the State of New York evenly shared the $650 million cost of the power project, will evenly divide the electricity that it produces. The Washington-chartered St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. administered all seaway construction in the U.S., while Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway Authority managed all seaway work north of the border. Industrialist James L. Duncan and Civil Servant Bennett John Roberts ran Canada's power and seaway agencies; Duluth Banker Lewis Castle and New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses were the U.S. chiefs. Because more of the work had to be done in Canada than the U.S., the Canadians will pay about 71% of the $440 million cost of the navigation works, collect the same proportion of all future ship tolls.

Geology and the northern weather provided rough obstacles. Along the Beauharnois Canal, contractors grated into sandstone so hard that it wore out drill bits in eight hours, had to soften the stone by firing it with kerosene torches at 4,000DEG F. They burned, drilled and blasted through two miles of solid rock. Partly to stabilize employment in Canada, contractors there kept up work at full speed through the winter months; they battled towering icefloes that threatened cofferdams, poured concrete in subzero weather, using jets of steam to keep it from freezing while it cured.

The Eighth Sea. The Great Lakes, long one of the world's busiest waterways, will grow even busier when deep-draft ships can steam directly from the ocean lanes into the ports of Toronto, Cleveland and Chicago in what trade promoters like to call the Eighth Sea, the Fourth Coast, the North American Mediterranean. The main payloads on the old 14-ft. canals -- iron ore upstream from Labrador and wheat downstream to Montreal--will fill the holds of probably nine-tenths of the ships on the new canal. Seaway planners forecast a traffic load of 25 million tons on the new seaway next season--just double the old seaway's 13 million tons of 1957--and 50 million tons a year by 1968.

From Kingston, Ont. to Duluth, port directors and trade promoters are trying to forecast the trade patterns through the new seaway--and cash in on them. Toronto is watching a new $10 million sugar refinery rise on its waterfront to process raw sugar from the Caribbean. Cleveland will deepen its harbor to provide safe berthing for the ore boats from Labrador, and Chicago is building a new seaport from the mud up in Lake Calumet, a onetime shallow slough and garbage dump.

For Ontario, the St. Lawrence's power output is fully as important as its ship channels. St. Lawrence power costs 44% less than electricity from coal-fired plants, was desperately needed to fuel Ontario's rapidly expanding postwar industry. In Massena, Reynolds Metals Co. is building a power-gulping aluminum reduction plant.

The St. Lawrence project seems sure to stimulate another profitable industry along the river: entertainment of tourists. Almost from the day digging began, uninvited visitors streamed toward the construction sites with cameras and questions. Ontario Hydro rallied quickly, organized free bus tours of its building sites, will play host to an estimated 1,000,000 visitors this year. Locks and dams have been provided with observation towers, and parks line the river's banks at interesting points. Already, seaway officials are making big plans for a huge public celebration next year. Then, if all goes as planned, Queen Elizabeth II, sovereign of Canada, and Dwight Eisenhower, President of the U.S., will meet somewhere along the St. Lawrence and--while tens of thousands watch--dedicate one of the world's most impressive monuments to practical international cooperation.

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