"Billion Dollar Engineer"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 541, 4 November 1949, Page 6

"Billion Dollar Engineer"

HE room at the top of the Departmental Building in Stout Street, Wellington, was bare except for a desk at its farther end, and there sat one of the world’s great men. He was small, white-haired, and wore rimless glasses. When he spoke his voice rarely rose above a whisper, and he gave the impression of being painfully shy. He was not interested in the view of the wharves and harbour from his window, but concentrated on the papers spread out before him, referring occasionally to a large suitcase packed with technical publications on the floor by his chair. A map of Otago and the Clutha River was pinned inside its lid. John Lucian Savage is not a great soldier, statesman, or financier. He is known in America, where he was born, as "Jack Dam," and has sometimes been called the first billion-dollar engineer. It would be no exaggeration to say that he has designed more than half the world’s big dams, with their attendant hydro-electric power plants and irrigation schemes, and the list of projects with which he has been concerned occupies 37 lines of small print in Who’s Who. He has probably left his mark more widely and permanently upon the earth than any other living person, and

yet he is a humble man. It is only when he talks about schemes like his immense projected dam in the Yangtze Gorge-which will control that river’s disastrous floods, irrigate 10,000,000 acres of land, and revolutionise the living conditions of half a contirfent--that his face lights with a quiet enthusiasm which shows that if he is an engineer first, he is also a humanitarian. Most of his work has been done as chief designing engineer for the United States Bureau of Reclamation, and since his retirement in 1945 he has continued working in an advisory capacity. He is visiting New Zealand now to report on the Roxburgh hydro scheme, and to inspect other schemes, including projected developments on the Waikato. FARM BORN OHN SAVAGE was born on a Wisconsin farm 70 years ago, he said last week, when talking about his career to The Listener. He described how he had started with the Government Reclamation Service in 1903, and then decided in 1908 to go into private business. He worked for eight years as a consulting engineer in the western States of America, designing and participating in many important structures. Private engineering practice could have been lucrative, but he preferred instead to take part in what he describ-

ed as "enterprises that have as their objective the development of human relationsi’ This was one reason for his return to the Reclamation Bureau, where in 1924 he was placed in charge of design. "T was chief designing engineer for a_ great many years," he said, "and in the past decade I have inspected, at the request of the State Department, hydro electric projects in many countries, including China, India, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Israel and Australia." He has also had a hand in six dams completed in Pakistan since India was partitioned. "And I forgot to men-' tion Mexico-they’re one of our biggest customers. And British Columbia; we worked on a big project up* there too." His first big private job was‘an irrigation project for the sugar companies (continued on next page)

» (continued from previous page) in San Domingo, and he was also associated with hydro projects in Puerto Rico. Another early. task was the designing of the Madden Dam in the Panama Canal Zone, which he described as "a large structure to supply water to the locks as well as electric power." His favourite work is the gigantic Boulder Dam (recently renamed the Hoover: Dam) and the power plant there, one.of a number of stupendous power structures in America designed by him and his engineers in the 15 years before he began to travel abroad. Incorporated in the Boulder Dam were several striking developments in dam building’ which were the result of research ‘carried out by the Bureau. It was necessary, for instance, tg produce a crack-free mass of concrete during a construction period of two years, and Dr. Savage and his experts devised a system which could accomplish in a few months, the same amount of cooling without cracks, which in the past would have taken more than 100 years. This method is now in general use. TVA E designed the Grand Coulee Dam, the biggest.in the world, the Shasta, Norris, Wheeler, Owyhee, and other giant dams, and supervised the designing of many smaller ones. He has also been in charge of the designing of hundreds of canals and irrigation works, and is still. a» consultant to the Tennessee Valley authority. In this connection, he said, "The TVA Bill gave the Board of Directors power to take any man they wanted, and Arthur E. Morgan, the first director, tried hard to commandeer me. But Boulder Canyon was still in the picture, and 1 stayed with them." TVA was another piece of evidence, for him, of the good that dam builders can do for the world. For decades: the Tennessee Valley’s 42,000 square miles were unproductive lands. Floods devastated the lowlands and rains eroded the deforested hills. There was little industry, and the. malaria-ridden people were as impoverished as the soil. Twelve years later TVA had transformed it into one of the wonders of the New World. Dams, turbines, reforestation, and agricultural improvement had made the valley richer and greener than ever before. The clear river, which had once run brown with top-soil, was harnessed and controlled by 28 dams (with two more under construction), and TVA’s electricity had brought new industries and sent up the average income of the valley dwellers by 73 per cent. "When I first went to Knoxville," Dr. Savage said, "every bank was closed and I hardly saw an automobile on the street. It was the dullest place I ever saw, and it’s quite a city at that. Now it’s a thriving centre of over 100, 000, and expanding rapidly." DAMMING THE YANGTZE "[N 1944," he continued, "I spent six months on the Yangtze inspecting the site of a dam which many consider will be the biggest project in the world for-the rest of time.. We planned to dam the river just above Ichang, in the gorge about 1,000. miles inland. ‘The resources there are tremendous, and on my recommendation the Chinese Gov-. ernment made a_ contract with the Bureau of Reclamation for designs. This was, suspended when the war with the Communists broke out, but. we got far enough to determine what power the Yangtze Dam could generate. It should produce fifteen and a-quarter million

kilowatts of electric power, as well as controlling floods and providing irrigation for ten million acres. The dam itself will be more than half as big again as the biggest dam’ now in existence, the Grand Coulee. The Grand Coulee contains 11,000,000 cubic yards of con-crete-the Yangtze will contain 18,000,000 cubic yards. "It will bea long time before it is completed now, of course," he added, "although fortunately the project lends itself to stage development, and could be made productive almost immediately." Later he talked about the scheme he is working ®n to dam the River Jordan

and pump water into the Dead Sea from the Mediterranean. This scheme, he explained, which had also been interrupted by war, involved the pumping of water 100 feet up from the Mediterranean and across country about 50 miles by open-cut canal to the Dead Sea Valley, where it would plunge down 1,300 feet into the Dead Sea itself. (He drew a plan of the water’s course to show the tremendous power which could be generated by such a fall.) The power generated by the hydro plants on the shore of the Dead Sea would be used for industrial purposes, while the second part of the scheme involved the

damming of the River Jordan and the diversion of its watets for irrigation. This would also prevent the level of water in the Dead Sea from being upset by the inflow of salt water from the Mediterranean. Harnessing the River Jordan would involve the construction of large storage dams, some of them in Lebanon, he said, so that the completion of this project (which would benefit both Jews and Arabs) would involve international agreements. As soon as his New Zealand visit was concluded, Dr. Savage said, he would be going back to Israel to do further work on this scheme.