Letter to the Editor: Taum Sauk failure raises Bagnell Dam concern

It looks like the 2008 Missouri gubernatorial race started this year with Blunt the younger and Nixon the attorney general lobbing cannonballs across each other's bows and politicizing last year's Johnson's Shut-Ins tragedy.

Although this Republication governor and Democratic attorney general are contemptible, and these actions bode ill for what is most definitely a forerunner of the people's business being curtailed the next three years, AmerenUE has got some housekeeping to do.

According to the St. Louis paper, internal e-mails circulated warnings about a number of breaches in the upper Taum Sauk Reservoir.

Also, apparently the dike construction was shoddy and inadequate. This is a private entity that is a public utility and has power over facilities that should be in the jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers!

According to the Ameren Web page, AmerenUE serves vast areas of northwest, northeast, central, east-central and southeast Missouri.

Its hydroelectric assets include a facility on the Mississippi River in Keokuk, Iowa, the failed Taum Sauk facility and Bagnell Dam.

Bagnell Dam began assembly as a private entity in the late 1920s. Union Electric (the owner of the facility in that era) finished the structure in 1931 - less than two years after construction began.

Bagnell Dam, a total concrete configuration, took a tenth of the time to complete compared to our very own Truman Dam. Herein may lie a problem.

A well-respected acquaintance of mine, who in the late 1970s was a concrete inspector for the new bridges in the Truman Lake region, discussed at length Bagnell Dam in the years before Truman Lake was formed.

He suggested that when Bagnell was built, it had a 50-year life span because of its hasty assembly. He mentioned credible concerns of imminent concrete collapses because no allowances were made within the structure to permit the cement to cure in such a short period of time. Remember, Union Electric, a private company using 1920s technology, built Bagnell Dam.

With AmerenUE exhibiting incompetence in the Taum Sauk matter, and given the fact that it's feasible Bagnell has possibly surpassed its suggested life span and may be heading for impending structural failure, should our citizens that live on the shores of the lake be fretful for their future financial well-being?

Furthermore, and most importantly, should Missourians who live below Bagnell on the banks of the Osage River be concerned for their families' safety?

-Michael J. Rash

Clever