Kudos to the Tennessee Valley Authority for reopening tours to our hydroelectric dams - Chickamauga, included - and the Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Facility.
TVA closed tour access to power plants after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, citing security concerns.
Now that those concerns have abated, it's time again to offer residents and ratepayers some fun and eye-opening lessons about the herculean task of producing electricity - and especially the value of harnessing Mother Nature and our abundant water system to make clean, alternative and cheap - the cheapest of cheap - energy.
Here in the Tennessee Valley and on the Tennessee River, we were making power with alternative energy before alternative energy was cool. Even before it was alternative.
When TVA built its dams on the Tennessee River, flowing water was the only source for electricity in the region for decades before the first coal or nuclear power plant was built.
And the Raccoon Mountain mystique is doubly amazing. It stores the ability to make power in a pinch to help with peak-power demand. It is literally a battery-like power plant inside a mountain with a lake on top that makes you feel as though you're in a James Bond movie.
Our hydro-history is important and impressive. And what better way do we have to teach our young folks the can-do value of sustainability in a time of climate uncertainty?
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which created most of our dams and hydro plants, was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal to put a Depression-era America back to work by creating the very infrastructure that would power our livelihoods generations into the future. TVA, like Roosevelt's other "alphabet agencies" like Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), tackled important problems facing the Southeast - like flooding, providing electricity to homes and businesses and replanting forests.
Would that other presidents and Congresses had worked together to be so caring for our country and far-sighted for its people.