page_title: Rampart Dam
section_title: Planning
hierarchical_section_title: Rampart Dam / Planning
caption_attribution_description: English: A map of the proposed reservoir that would have been created by the Rampart Dam on the Yukon River in Alaska. Actual rivers are in dark blue, and the proposed reservoir is shaded in diagonal blue. Fairbanks, Alaska, is at center bottom. This map is an excerpt of a larger map published in 1962.
context_page_description: The Rampart Dam or Rampart Canyon Dam was a project proposed in 1954 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dam the Yukon River in Alaska for hydroelectric power. The project was planned for Rampart Canyon just 31 miles southwest of the village of Rampart, Alaska and about 105 miles west-northwest of Fairbanks, Alaska.
  The resulting dam would have created a lake roughly the size of Lake Erie, making it the largest man-made reservoir in the world. The plan for the dam itself called for a concrete structure 530 feet high with a top length of about 4,700 feet. The proposed power facilities would have consistently generated between 3.5 and 5 gigawatts of electricity, based on the flow of the river as it differs between winter and summer.
  Though supported by many politicians and businesses in Alaska, the project was canceled after objections were raised. Native Alaskans in the area protested the threatened loss of nine villages that would be flooded by the dam. Conservation groups abhorred the threatened flooding of the Yukon Flats, a large area of wetlands that provides a critical breeding ground for millions of waterfowl.
context_section_description: The first serious consideration of a dam project was made in a 1954 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment of the resources of the Yukon and Kuskokwim River basin. Engineers considered Rampart Canyon to be a prime site for a hydroelectric dam. In April 1959, four months after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Alaska's declaration of statehood, junior U.S. Senator from Alaska Ernest Gruening passed a resolution calling for the Corps of Engineers to begin an official study of the project, and $49,000 was allocated by the federal government for that purpose. Preliminary estimates said the project would cost $900 million (1959 dollars) and generate 4.7 million kilowatts of electricity. At the time, the largest hydroelectric project in Alaska was the Eklutna Dam, which produced just 32,000 kilowatts.
  The project competed with the smaller-scale Susitna Hydroelectric Project proposed by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation for south-central Alaska, but thanks to Gruening's support and that of other backers, the Rampart project took precedence. The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1960 passed by the U.S. Congress in that year included a $2 million appropriation to conduct a full four-year feasibility study of the project, including its economic feasibility and the impact it would have on fish and wildlife. In March 1961, a team of engineers from the Corps' Alaska district began drilling operations at the site to determine bedrock depth and gather other data. To examine the economic feasibility of the dam, the Corps of Engineers created the Rampart Economic Advisory Board (REAB) in February 1961. The REAB hired David E. Lilienthal's Development and Resources Corporation in April to complete the study, and a team of Corps engineers and REAB members arrived in the state in June to study the Rampart project first-hand. At that time, Sen. Gruening estimated that the project would cost roughly $1.2 billion  to complete.
  As investigation and planning work continued, the Corps of Engineers reached an agreement with the Department of the Interior, the parent agency of the Bureau of Reclamation, in March 1962. The agreement stated the Corps would have responsibility for design and construction of the project, while the Interior Department would be responsible for running and maintaining the dam after completion. In the planning stages, the Interior Department also would be responsible for examining the economic feasibility of the project and its effect upon natural resources. This agreement negated much of the work of the REAB to that point, as the Interior Department promptly began its own three-year study of the dam's economic feasibility and environmental impact. The DRC report, though trumped by the Interior Department's new precedence in such matters, nevertheless released a report in April 1962, stating that the project was economically feasible and would attract new industries to Alaska. Meanwhile, the Corps of Engineers continued engineering studies.
  The interim Corps of Engineers report was released in December 1963, and reported that building the dam was feasible from an engineering standpoint. President John F. Kennedy supported the project, and lobbied for an appropriation of $197,000 (1963 dollars) to continue study of the project. The needed money was included in a House appropriations bill, and studies continued. The initial report included some figures about the size of the project. The dam would be a concrete structure 530 feet (162 m) high and about 4,700 feet (1,430 m) long. It would raise the height of the Yukon River from 215 feet (66 m) above sea level to approximately 656 feet (200 m). The resulting reservoir would be 400 miles (640 km) long, 80 miles (130 km) wide, and have a surface area greater than that of Lake Erie. The power facilities for the project would produce a maximum of 5 gigawatts of electricity. In total, the proposed reservoir was anticipated to cover an area of 10,700 square miles (27,700 km²) and have a capacity of 1,300,000,000 acre feet (1,600 km³).
  In April 1964, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (
caption: A drawing of the proposed Rampart Dam reservoir, created in 1961.
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