Geoscience Education in the Mountain State:
CATS Environmental Earth Science Telecourse, Fall 1999,
Show 3 Transcript

CATS Telecourse
Environmental Earth Science
October 11, 1999

Dr. Bob: Bob Behling along with Deb. We're here this evening to share a few things with you on the CATS Telecourse on Environmental Earth Science. Deb you have lots of news and this is a big week coming up with the WVSTA meeting.

Dr. Deb: That's right. We've been working very hard to get the WVSTA program together. We have approximately 165 sessions ready for you on Friday and Saturday so we've got a great line up of tours. If you haven't received any of the literature you can come in and register on site at the Civic Center in Charleston starting on Thursday evening about 5 o'clock. There will be some things going on Thursday like the exhibit hall will be opening up and the auction. Our third annual auction. If you have any excess materials that you'd like to get rid of and replace with other excess materials from another school. You're invited to attend that. Saturday we have our session scheduled all day and Friday as well with tours intermixed. The banquet is Friday night. Our featured speaker for the banquet is Plotkin who is known as the "Medicine Man." He's done all his research in the rain forest. He'll be around for both days. He'll do some autographing. We also have Homer Hickham who will be there for the opening session on Friday morning from 10 until noon. He'll be around to sign some books as well.

Dr. Bob: Super, super. This evening (goes to overhead) we'll get right to our outline. We're going to start out...the first session before the break we'll look at mass movement. The classification of mass movement and then featured in the West Virginia scene we've got a web site that we'll bring up and give you time to copy down the access through the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Remediation is a fancy jargon word for trying to fix it. It's seldom that we can prevent the material from moving if we undercut or overload it but we'll work at that. Subsidence, a related feature to mass movement and we'll talk about the news today about a very interesting and tragic situation ongoing in Mexico. After the break we'll come back and switch gears, in a way, but it really relates to the same thing because so much of the subsidence and the mass movement is a direct result of surface water. We'll talk about the geology of river valleys, floods and the type of floods, especially as they effect West Virginia. Dams and reservoirs, what we've been doing to rivers the world over and feature some really classic situations not only in the United States but one on going that you really must know about in China. Talk about water east, water west. That relates to the water in the United States and how we treat things and mistreat things. Cadillac Desert is a series of video tapes put together by PBS based on the publication by the same name. We do not yet have sufficient copies for all the nineteen downlink sites. Therefore we're going to comment upon it but you will not be faced with specific questions until we get it in November when we review some more on policy and that works in very nicely. The reading, if you haven't already done so, Chapters 7, 8 and 9, are the information that we will be covering this evening. One other comment...the quizzes, there has been down time and only late this afternoon was the E-mail flowing again out to the Survey. This being a state holiday we'll give you another 48 hours for Quiz #1. We have a big backlog of things, we're logging them in, Tom worked up until show time to log in a great number. There will be another 48 hours so don't worry about it. If you seem to have had trouble getting on, it's quite likely at our end that the trouble existed. Tomorrow morning Quiz #2 will be up and then that will be due November 1st. The realization that next week, Monday, we have the adjunct again and then we are not back on live with the specific CATS shows until Monday, November 1st. We have the WVSTA coming up and then the Geological Society of American Meeting in Denver and it's a rather busy time.

Deb, one of the things I thought would be good, in the context of the outline, there is one project that is available on rivers that you might talk about and share your experience if you've used that one.

Dr. Deb: (Puts book on overhead) This is called "River Cutters." It's a product of GEMS. Our Sunrise Museum has done a series of workshops on gems. You can buy this through NSTA publications, the National Science Teachers Association. If you don't have access to that catalog you can access it online, nsta.org, so you can acquire anything like this. This is designed for grades 6 through 9. What you're trying to do is establish stream type observations in the classroom. You can't always afford a stream table. We will have a stream table at WVSTA for those of you that are coming. Emily Grafton will have that set up and you can see that it's a very cumbersome thing. It's expensive to own and unless you have one in your classroom already, odds are you're not going to think it's economically feasible to acquire one. "River Cutters" is a nice way of still using the concept of a stream table but instead of using this big setup you're using a plastic tub and diatomaceous earth. Then you set up a drip system either using a small plastic cup and you can observe v-shaped channels being formed, meanders, oxbow lakes. It's a nice series that walks you through some explorations on that.

Dr. Bob: On the exploratory we had just a little over a week ago we also saw some very nice things just in a parking lot. Where ever there is construction in an open area you can talk about marvelous things on erosion, deposition, transportation in a scale that's natural but you don't have to pay anything for it.

Dr. Deb: If you have any type of construction going on at the school and they've defoliated an area and it has rained recently your bound to find any of these features. If you don't then "River Cutters" is a nice supplement.

Dr. Bob: This other one. It's really amazing. It's always so interesting. You're just looking at the micro scale of things and scale is always a critical factor in whatever you do in an attempt to replicate nature. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a huge facility in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to examine what could be the problems and concerns in everyday activities in the Mississippi River. There's all these different scales of the activities that you might want to look at.

Was there anything in Project WET or any of those other projects that somehow relates to this?

Dr. Deb: Project WET has a considerable number of activities that you can use. It's a much thicker volume then "River Cutters." They're a little bit more game oriented. You'll find a lot of role playing activities but then again they do have numerous activities that aren't. If you pick and choose and kind of adapt them to more open ended types of explorations they're nice.

Dr. Bob: Ok, marvelous. Let's head into our first outline topic and that is the discussion of mass movement. You probably have many times used the word landslides. I have introduced now a little different terminology. The only reason that some geologists have turned to the term mass movement is that landslides has become a term that encompasses so many different things. The use of the word slide in the word landslides belies a certain type of a movement where there may be an almost discrete plane, a false surface or a bedding plane where the rocks are translational sliding. This meaning that they're going downhill under the influence of gravity along that surface of weakness. Mass movement tries to encompass then all the types of movement. In a classification scheme it's also very useful to start out with the understanding that speed of movement is a major focus. I start with just a few terms so that you understand that there are a variety of velocities of the movement. Creep, by its very name, indicates that it is very slow. This is something that we would see over a lifetime or two. Where on a very gentle slope telephone poles or fence posts eventually are tilted in the down slope direction. The stumps of trees as the trees and geotropism as we learned back when working with vegetation, the attempt of the tree to reach vertically upward for the full effect of the sun and as the substrate is moving very, very slowly downhill the stump will rotate and move upward. Creep is extremely slow and it is not something that you can watch in any one season although there is some types of movement that we'll talk about that if the rain is very heavy you'll see a little movement and could watch it. Solifluction is a special type of feature in that areas where there is seasonal ground frost. That simply means that during the winter the substrate is frozen. If it is water saturated then below the surface there is a frozen layer. As the onset of spring it thaws from the surface on down because of the sun warming the land. That leaves a zone of diminishing thickness where it's still frozen. But if there is snow melt and spring rains the water can't percolate into that saturated horizon and as a result in solifluction there's the potential for this saturated zone, again without a scale, it may be several centimeters, 10s of centimeters or so, will move downhill in that spring season but then when this all thaws the water will percolate down to whatever rate would be dictated by the size of the sediments and the density compaction of the sediments. Solifluction can occur in areas of seasonal ground frost, quite often here in West Virginia in the highland areas. There's also solifluction where there is permanently frozen ground and to no surprise it's called permafrost. Permanently frozen substrate. In a permanently frozen substrate there is an active horizon and then that active horizon will be enhanced during the summer months and in the far northern or southern latitudes it would be right at the surface during the winter months. This active zone is very difficult one to work in if your going to build a highway, put in a house, telephone poles or whatever. Permafrost becomes a real problem in working with this. This cross hatch pattern can be dry permafrost, meaning the pore space is not completely filled with water but there is ice crystal material present or ice cemented. That word really is true. I've tried to drill through that and you have to use a jackhammer. Ice cemented permafrost is tough old stuff. Dynamite or jackhammer is about all that your going to be able to do. That completes my solifluction discussion.

Then slide, this is a term obviously that suggests more rapid movement. You can actually see it move. May be a transitional rock slide where a slab, if the rocks are dipping like this, one piece will break free along a joint surface and then move down. Not good if you have a roadway down here. You can see some of this in West Virginia in the Valley and Ridge Province where the rocks are dipping at that angle. The slab like this could come out onto the highway and pose problems and danger for those below. Then there's also mud slide, as the name implies, this is pretty much saturated. It's almost a mud slide or mud flow. Many times we talk about mud slides but there's so much water present there's a mudflow. If you've been watching the news you realize that in eastern Mexico, just off onland along the Gulf of Mexico, they've been having extraordinary rainfalls, 28 inches in two days in some places in those areas in Mexico. As a result, just this last weekend there's a terrible tragedy in a small town, Mexican/Native Indian town and it was during the week so kids were in school and the school was involved. It wasn't a typical mud flow. When they got some information they found that usually mud flows and mud slides come from the surface down. This one as survivors described it just seemed to be the bottom falling out. It's probably a case of subsidence with a very sticky voluminous mud on top becoming involved in it. A teacher and her students were in a school and they called to them, two students ran out but the rest did not. All those that stayed with the building perished and they are only now trying to find the victims. It's a very tragic situation. If you get caught in mud flows like that, in this case, subsidence and mud flow, the town was probably built on limestone caverns, then with the tremendous volume of water...one possibility, just speculation is that the pressure builds up under ground with all that water filling the pore space and it blasts out an opening. It makes larger an opening and then when that happens the water moves out very, very rapidly. What has been held up by the water filling the chamber no longer does that and the roof collapses in. That's just speculation on my part but it is one type of explanation for the types of things that can happen in mud slides or rock slides. There's also the potential for a fall. Sometimes it's a free fall, meaning that a good deal of the material has actually fallen free, either rock or soil can be involved in this. Often it's a result of undercutting of the banks by a river. Here's a river undercutting a bank and the material either unconsolidated material or rock with joints in it can no longer sustain it's own weight in that overhang and it will fall. There's another term that's primarily developed by the highway engineers, a topple. That means that it rotates over and rolls over and then becomes involved. A lot of these rock topples as a result of failure along the interstates. There are many times in West Virginia where one lane of the interstate is closed because that debris is caught very close to the road. If you recall when we build interstates we build them with a catchment area at the base and then terrace the interstate. That terracing is not designed for esthetic value or to diminish the cost of construction. It's designed to catch the rocks so that the debris doesn't come directly onto the highway. On Route 50 on the way to the exploratory 10 days ago they were mucking out the trench and going to have to get up on one of the terraces to take off the material. If you build up that material then it has the potential to scoot right on across. Rock topples, rock slides, there's also a hybrid type called a slump. A slump is a very interesting feature. It's often preceded at the crest by tension cracks. Pull aparts. Then that makes it even worse in the rain because the tension cracks become catchment areas for water. This is on a hillside and what eventually transpires is that there is a rotational swing out and the toe is often disturbed land, there's compression down here, water's squeezed out and a spring is amidst from the toe of the slope. This part is the toe and this is the head of the slope. There is tension at the head, compression at the toe and the rotation is often along a discrete line. I always characterize it in the analogy...it's like taking a very warm spoon into a side of jello, into a mold of jello. The jello with the hot spoon just rotates right out the bowl of the spoon. Slump is another possible feature. The really dangerous ones, the ones that move very fast, avalanche. Mud flows can move pretty rapidly also. Lahars, where we introduce again, mud flow, and a lahar is a mud flow specifically off a volcano. The debris and ash and ejected material or tephra is mobilized by the water. Often volcanoes create their own storms because of the enormous amount of water vapor that's emitted, as well as, lightning, charged particles, difference in temperature, this great plume of super heated water vapor going up 10 thousand, 30 thousand, 40 thousand feet you're going to get a lot of rain right during the eruption. Then it's going to immediately mobilize some of that ash. But in the avalanches, the debris avalanche, all kinds of material, rocks, trees and so forth. Often we attribute the word avalanche to be preceded by the word snow but debris also is a problem. Debris flow...you'll read about some cases in the text. You can't outrun debris flow. If you're caught up in something like that, sometimes triggered by earthquakes, as in Huascaran in Peru where most of an entire town was wiped out as a result of the side of the mountain, a volcano, being triggered loose by a rather substantial sharp earthquake.

Dr. Deb: It seems like when you're looking at all of these different types of mass movement the speed at which it takes place and the material that it's moving and the way it's moving is what distinguishes one from the other.

Dr. Bob: Quite often, especially in materials, rock fall versus soil fall. It helps describe the situation. There's a great package of information available on the West Virginia Geological Survey web site. Deb why don't you walk us through that. It's a homeowner's guide to geologic hazards. It also introduces another word...subsidence.

Dr. Deb: If you go to the computer monitor we have the homeowners guide to geologic hazards which was taken from a publication and talks about the fact that in West Virginia if you build an ideal home on an ideal spot you want to make sure it's level ground. You want to make sure it's well drained. It impresses upon us that that's not likely to be found in West Virginia. So there's several problems with building in West Virginia. Because of the hillsides and the river valleys we face many geologic hazards. One being floods and so when you build in a flood plain you're likely to face periodic flooding. They have nice photographs that the students can go to the web page and see the results of flooding. This one happens to be one in Petersburg from the 1985 flood. They talk about landslides, mass movement, and they talk about some of the vocabulary terms you mentioned. Slips, slumps, rock falls, slides, flows and they have a really nice figure here of this type of rotational movement where you have the crown here and you can see those tensional cracks that you mentioned and then you have a scarp face where the debris moved down from. You've got the head of the material, another scarp, then the toe of this material that has moved down to here. They show the slip or the plane at which this moved.

Dr. Bob: If there are any trees at the head of the slope they actually tilt back into the slope. You can see it in the springtime so dramatically.

Dr. Deb: These are visible along 79 as your going down the road, you can see one or two of these at any given time of the year. Some larger then others.

Dr. Bob: With that homeowner I've done a lot of consulting. What I have tried to impress upon people is put in a culvert up above. Put in concrete. Don't let that water get down into the soil and shunt it off away from all the buildings. Leave it in a solid concrete base. Get that water away from the upper part of the slope.

Dr. Deb: Any builder or homeowner knows what the word french drain means. You try to move that water that might accumulate around a basement out away from the foundation.

Dr. Bob: The french drain would be buried down along the footers.

Dr. Deb: This is a result of an old slide from soil movement. You can see that the sidewalk has given way or the road way has actually given way. There's where the soil has been removed adjacent to the road.

Dr. Bob: That's very dramatic because it's so big but on a small scale there's something called soil piping. Often in sands. When that sand gets dry, if the water table is lowered then that sand starts moving. It starts moving in discrete little tube circles and that's not any fun when it turns out to be beneath your garage or your house because it's swiss cheesing the material underneath. It just pipes on down and gravity is the driving force in all of this. It can be a real problem even though you can't see it as dramatically as that.

Dr. Deb: Another photograph here is of a landslide that happened in Kanawha County in 1973. The whole material from this hillside just gave way and took out part of this fellows porch.

Dr. Bob: Along Rt. 2 in the western part of the Ohio River and the West Virginia side is just a classic area. Communities all along Route 2 are just plagued by these problems.

Dr. Deb: Now we're moving into what can happen with subsidence. Any time your house is undermined or in an area of Karst areas when you have any type of collapse.

Dr. Bob: That situation is occurring in Mexico. Karst being a term from Yugoslavia but applying in many places in West Virginia. Greenbrier, Monroe, Jefferson and Berkeley Counties, any county with a pretty good thickness of limestone underneath. There could be solution weathering and the top caves in.

Dr. Deb: This could be natural it doesn't have to be man made. You can have sink holes do just as much damage as undermining from coal seams or coal mining. Here's an example of a cracked basement, here the block has cracked and then you can see the offset here on the garage door.

Dr. Bob: The ultimate is the garage door has to be removed because it won't work.

Dr. Deb: Here is an excellent picture of what happens in mine subsidence. If you've got all of this overburden that is overlying the coal seam, the coal seam has been removed from this area.

Dr. Bob: That's the old room and pillar. They went back and robbed the pillars because coal isn't very tough. You have to leave a lot of it there to hold up the rest of the rock otherwise it will crush. The really important aspect of this is that it is not just the area directly above the pillar. It turns out that what it is called an angle of draw. It's a funnel shaped situation so that the area of limit of subsidence will fall outside a vertical line drawn from the room up to the surface. Many times these don't' manifest until decades later. A church in Fairmont, about a year ago, had to relocate. They were over an old underground mine and they lost it. Some new techniques such as the new coal mining operations where your doing the long wall panel. It's designed to have the land subside behind you. Not only then can there be subsidence at the surface but if you notice those rocks that any aquifer that you happen to have your well, sandstones, talk about folks saying they lost their well almost immediately, you know what? You lose the water almost immediately. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago that in Pennsylvania in the Pimatuming (sp) earthquake it cracked the sandstones in the same way and that water was gone. It just drains right out because it follows the joint surfaces and the cracks that are created. A real problem.

Dr. Deb: You can see here that the sandstone has been disrupted and it's no longer just a solid chunk of sandstone. It has cracks and all sorts of problems.

Dr. Bob: You can call that break down material filling up the old room.

Dr. Deb: Water is not going to maintain its same integrity as if this were a solid chunk of sandstone.

Go to the Survey's web site and pick up Geohazards.

Dr. Bob: Two words I have mentioned before...undercutting and overloading. We want to talk briefly to show you some types of techniques for remediation. Isn't this what so often. I've exaggerated the slope but we take a cutout even for a single family home. There's the original slope and then we put the material we've removed out on the outer slope so we can park our car. Then we put in a building but the building is going to have to be sturdy enough to hold back this slope. Material on a slope is at best temporarily an equilibrium. If a great deal of water comes the water may add to the overloading. Here we've undercut it and made it unstable. What we have to do is find ways to protect the home and also remediation if the slope starts moving. One of the ways in order to protect the slope from moving...gabions have become very popular. They are wire baskets. Sometimes their double baskets of galvanized wire and it looks like a chain link fence. It's wired together and built on site. It even has a cover that's also chain link fence. There's a crimping tool that wires them together, then they take big angular blocks and they put them in. It takes a good deal of human effort because you can't just dump loads from a front end loader. Quite often the dimension on these are about 3 feet or a meter or so. This would be about six feet or 2 meters. These gabions aren't real attractive but they do hold up the slope and in effect they're put at the base of the slope replacing the mass lost from undercutting with a replacement mass. There is a potential to use gabions. Also a crib. A crib is a three dimensional structure with precast concrete. If you ever played with Lincoln logs, you know how they lock together, that's what they do with this. They create a crib then they pour the course material in it again to allow drainage. You can actually build a wall and create a cast concrete wall and sometimes the wall is poured concrete or in earlier years they just used blocks or even 4 x 8 treated lumber. What you really should have in these cases are weep holes. Mechanisms to let the water out. What you should also have is a dead man. Now a dead man is simply an anchor. Some engineers might use the word tie backs. Depending on the nature of the material you might want to get something in there and hold it and bury it. There's a really neat type of dead man material they're using here in town. They're taking individual precast blocks and they're offset so that the next one will go like this. It has a real fancy face on it. The next one is like this and so forth. Then every two or three courses they put in a dead man. They fill all this up with gravel. The dead man is real interesting. It's a high tensile strength grid in plastic and they bury one part of it right at the edge of the block so you don't see any of it and then they fill it up with gravel for the rest of the two tiers. This is being done right behind the Boston Beanery right here in Morgantown in the Suncrest area. The reason that they need this is that they are working in unconsolidated sediment, those rascally old lake sediments. This is just a few of the types of mechanisms. But, a gabion has become very, very popular. More often than not you'll see places where the attempt to hold the slope is not working. This method of building up these individual blocks from the surface, the block is really needed. Each one of these blocks weighs about 80 pounds. It's a moose. They gave me one. I'm carrying around one of these blocks in the back of my car. They used a front end loader to load it. It stands about 12 to 15 inches in height and they fill it up with gravel. The reason it's got angles like this is it adds greater strength because the slope is behind here and pushing potentially. The next block fits here and they've got this extra strong structure of the next block and so forth. It's filled with gravel and they'll lay on top of this the dead man and put another foot and a half to two feet of gravel on top of this. It really attempts to anchor that material. There's all kinds of problems and remediation solutions. Some of the mom and pop. Some of them don't work.

One last comment. We said in this outline before the break we are going to mention subsidence, we already have. Let's feature again and look at an outline cartoon that uses exactly the words that we talked about. First of all, mining. Mining causes subsidence because underground mining we're taking something out or we're undercutting a surface as in getting gravel and taking it out. Solution weathering leads to karst. In West Virginia that means that limestone is dissolved resulting in caves. Some other states in the United States, salt is being dissolved out. Rock salt. Louisiana and New York there's rock salt below the surface where this problem has been a real concern unfortunately. Then, we talked about soil piping. One thing we didn't mention because it's not in West Virginia but certainly in the western states and that gets us into the second half of the presentation, removal of liquids. Many places that liquid is ground water. In Long Beach California it's petroleum. In areas imagine this, subsidence of up to thirty feet because of the removal over a long period, a couple of decades, if you take a lot of ground water or a lot of oil out it's going to subside.

Dr. Deb: Does Texas have a lot of problems with that?

Dr. Bob: Texas has a lot of problems in Houston with ground water. If the petroleum is very deep it's not as much of a problem as it is in the unconsolidated along the coast.

So let's take a break here and we'll be back with the second half of the presentation. Talk about our water resources on the surface. We're saving ground water although we needed to mention it here in subsidence. Just take a 10 minute break we'll be back real soon.

[BREAK]

Dr. Bob: (joined in progress) In the eastern U.S. and a bit in the far west in Washington what we are doing is we are taking dams down. Examples in Maine, for example, where we caused companies that built the dams, they have to undergo the burden of cost to take these dams down. We find very rapidly that the aquatic ecosystem spreads up river past where the dam was very, very rapidly. Why can you take some of those dams down in the northeast? The lumber industry is not what it used to be. Other industries are not what it used to be. We don't need that power anymore for some of the tool manufacturing or for the mills in parts of New England. That's history. The dams should be history too. We should think of these as being temporary structures. Even I would submit Glen Canyon Dam, should be considered a temporary. Boulder Dam. There was recently and will probably will show again and again the history of the building of Boulder Dam on the History Channel. I think it's called one of the marvels of industry or something. Watch that, it is incredible who much concrete and rock we have poured to divert the Colorado River. The Missouri River is even more altered then the Colorado River. We might well look into the fact that these are only temporary features. True we're only looking at small features now. But even along the Columbia River in the state of Washington and adjacent states, Idaho and Oregon, the Columbia River is a site for the removal of some of these dams.

I'd like to call your attention on the overhead the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. This is a dateline site. It's the largest dam in the world. The structure itself is a mile long and 600 feet high. The flooding on the Yangtze is legendary. Last summer, 1998, there was a huge loss of life along that river. This winter there was drought. Then again when the rains came and the monsoon came, they're being hammered by typhoons throughout this monsoon season, the ground couldn't take the water and it flooded again. They had floods two years in a row. The flood in 1998 was one of the worst in decades. Over a million people were displaced. Hundreds and hundreds of people perished in the flooding. The disaster to the agriculture industry was unbelievable. The Three Gorges Dam in China is not only going to create a flood control, that is what they are using it for, but they are covering archeological sites that have never been touched or just barely recognized. They are removing up to a million people that have to be relocated. In West Virginia, the building of a dam in a valley, where do most people live? In the good soils in a valley. When you build a dam where do you put the water? On top of the good soils in the valley. When you put a very large dam, like the world's largest planned in this Three Gorges Dam, you also have to consider that you're putting an enormous weight on the surface of the earth. In India there's already evidence that a large, large reservoir has created earthquakes up to 5.0 on the Richter Scale in an area where earthquakes never existed before. At least earthquakes were not recorded at that magnitude since the area was settled and the history has been a written history of the region. This type of situation of water quality and quantity I urge you to check out the Yangtze Dam realizing that it is an agricultural society based on fertilizers, plants, and communities that are dominantly rural. The water quality issues as well as building up the quantity behind the dam are going to be incredible in China as the years ahead continue.

I'd also point out that not only is that on a web site but an issue about a year and a half ago on National Geographic. You'll have to use your index. I had the issue in my hand today and I forgot to look at the month and year. Seems to be to have come out in 98 but you can check your back issues of National Geographic for a pictorial essay along the Yangtze River.

The last issue to discuss, water east and water west, and how the United States has dealt with it's many water issues. Let me characterize what has happened in water east. Precipitation far exceeds evaporation or transpiration. Transpiration is a major problem or concern. In the Blue Ridge, for example, got it's name by the fact that during the summer months, hot and muggy, a great deal of water from the trees back to the atmosphere and a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere. But in the east we have tended to tame rivers primarily for transpiration. Where the river wouldn't agree to this we built locks and dams and canals. The canal system looked to be in early Americana and from the prerevolutionary days up until the mid 1800s, it looked as if canals were going to be our ticket to transporting goods and materials. The C & O Canal, a classic example. The New York Canal system where the federal government would not build the New York canal as envisioned from Buffalo down to Albany so that the grains and the produce could get to where the capitol was, where the people were in the 1800s. So the state of New York built their own barge canal. The barge canal today is being refurbished. Not because they're going to ship grain or anything from Buffalo but because they're going to use those segments for recreational boating. The towns along Lockport, New York, is so named because the locks on that New York barge canal were built right there in Lockport. Canals were thought to be "the" major issue. They were going to be the wave of the future. If you go to some areas you see that the bridges, the old stone bridges, arched up and over because it was anticipated that they were going to bring canals up over the Allegheny mountain. This is the Castleman River and you can go to see the local restaurants along the Castleman River and today this river is just a little trickle amongst the boulders. It will flood from time to time but the old stone arch goes up and over because they were going to build a canal through here. It never came to pass. The C & O canal ends in Cumberland, Maryland, because the railroad was invented, the steam engine. It quickly became clear that the steam engine had it all over canal and barge systems. You didn't have to depend on water being sufficient to keep the canals open. In the east we tended to work first on transportation and then flood control. And as a energy resource. The energy resource really came first historically because people were always damming up little streams just to get water to run the mills. Then as more and more energy was required it was quite clear that in the eastern United States energy resources could only be used for small operations. We didn't have that great of vertical fall, therefore, we couldn't generate as much energy as we could out west. The western water, aahh, irrigation and transportation. If you're going to build big dams, let's put in energy again and try to sell this whole package. Rivers like the Missouri, the Colorado, the Columbia, many rivers in the state of California. All of these rivers, more or less in the valleys but the Colorado and the Missouri and the Columbia, especially, go through arid lands. We have altered those systems to an extreme so that when this package of videos comes on Cadillac Desert as the name implies, it's an excellent book. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in our natural resources and the environment. It's well written. The PBS series is excellently done and we'll be getting those to you soon. They're in back order now and have been for over a month and a half.

Tune in, the next time we have an adjunct show that we meet together and tape that, then we'll be seeing you live on November 1st. Again we hope to get all stations up so that you are viewing us live. The technology is not always working but we'll get the tapes out to you, take care and see you at the WV Science Teachers Meeting in Charleston this weekend.

WVGES Education Specialist, Tom Repine (repine@wvgs.wvnet.edu)

Page last revised: October 1999

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            West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey
  Address:  Mont Chateau Research Center
            Cheat Lake exit off I-68
            P.O. Box 879
            Morgantown, WV  26507-0879
Telephone:  1-800-WV-GEOLOgy (1-800-984-3656) or 304-594-2331
      FAX:  304-594-2575
    Hours:  8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. EST, Monday - Friday