Juxtapose Image 1: Shipshaw Dam 1 under construction, 1941.
Juxtapose Image 2: Shipshaw Dam 2 under construction in the foreground, Dam 1 completed in the background, 1943.
Canada joined the Second World War on September 10th, 1939, and immediately afterwards began preparation for immersion in total war. Amongst other things, this meant that production of goods, weaponry, and technology of all kinds immediately escalated. As demand for wartime products increased, so too did demands for hydroelectricity to operate the facilities that would manufacture them, and hydroelectricity soon became vital to the war on all fronts. On this matter, most were in agreement: “power was not only critical to specific electrometallurgical industries such as aluminum and magnesium … but also served as the production matrix for many other industrial processes”(1). Hydroelectricity gave power to facilities in all major industries in Canada, increasing their capacity for production and output. At the time the war broke out, however, existing facilities were ill equipped to handle the massive increase in demands for hydroelectricity. One of the ways that they were met was through the construction and mobilization of hydro-electric dams and power stations. Several major projects were launched in Canada throughout the Second World War, including the Shipshaw Dam on the Saguenay River in Quebec, “one of the largest of all Canada's major wartime construction projects” that was capable of generating up to 900 kilowatts of power while operational (2). Construction on the Shipshaw Dam lasted over two years, beginning in mid 1941 and lasting until the project’s completion in late 1943, resulting in newly available power from two massive dams and their accompanying power station. The completion of the Shipshaw Dams afforded massive amounts of hydroelectricity to a number of facilities that needed it, though an emphasis was placed on supplying facilities processing and manufacturing aluminum, with “extra power for aluminum production being one of the highest of all wartime priorities” (3). Hydroelectricity was clearly one of the most vital elements geared towards powering the war effort, and the amount of time, money, and resources put into the facilities to produce it and increasing its availability at all costs aptly demonstrates that.
At the same time as they represent the triumph of an industry determined to meet demands to maintain the war effort, the Shipshaw Dams represent a massive, multimillion dollar campaign that severely disrupted the environment they were constructed on and continue to do so today. It not only reshaped the terrain through the construction process and the development of massive infrastructure over a two year period, but the finished project completely rerouted a section of the Saguenay River, and in doing so physically recast an entire series of wildlife habitats and ecosystems. “The new project which has changed the course of the river, moving it bodily from a valley to the top of a ridge, will have a rated capacity of 1,500,000 horsepower. This power will be used to make aluminum to make aircraft for the United Nations”, read the first publication made about the project, in 1943 (4). In addition to this, data collected before construction began in 1941 and in 1969 after its completion offered information as to the instability of ground conditions in the area, a long but little known concern that remained disregarded by the wider community (5). As such, ground instability and the neglect of geographical concerns can be added to the list of ways in which the environment was further compromised during construction to build infrastructure through which to increase power during the war. One other area impacted in constructing hydroelectric dams was the nearby or surrounding water. While hydroelectric dams act not so much to contaminate so much as to control the movement and flow of water, the process of the dams’ construction was itself a contaminant risk, as runoff from physical materials as well as those introduced by machines and workers had the potential to interact with and thus influence the composition of the water. This was even acknowledged at the time, as on viewing the completion of the first dam onlookers took note of “the top of a derrick protruding through the ice. It had fallen into the water and it was not worth the expense of retrieving it.” (6).
The pictures featured above look at two aspects of the Shipshaw Dams, first in 1941 and the next in 1943; the first picture shows the first Dam under construction, while the second picture, though it focuses primarily on the second Dam under construction, shows the completed first in the background. There were no photographs taken of the Shipshaw site before construction began for security purposes: because of the amount of money that went into the project, as well as its projected importance for the war effort, information about the project was kept as quiet as possible, and the project was heavily guarded by the military both during and after construction (7). The pictures shown below, the first a short film taken in 1952 showing the completed Shipshaw Dams and the power plants, and the second picture taken a few years ago in 2012, show that while the first of construction may have been completed during the war, the project has grown in the years since then and continues to expand. Throughout the process, construction was intense: it involved thousands of people and as mentioned above took over two years to complete, with the finished product spanning (as shown in the 1952 video) quite a large area of land and rerouting an entire segment of the Saguenay River. The length of time it took to construct, the number of people and the amount of machinery that was involved, and the expanse of land the project took over completely disrupted the environment and its ecosystems in this area, reshaping them entirely until they fit the needs of industry and the war effort. The Shipshaw Dams still function today, and still generate massive amounts of hydroelectricity per year, with periodical modifications or upgrades made to the existing facilities (8). Their presence remains a vivid reminder of the massive upheaval their construction caused and continues to cause to the surrounding environment, as well as the sheer power that they are capable of generating and its vitality to the war effort, in one area above all: aluminum.
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