Seneca Dam

rdf:langString Seneca Dam

rdf:langString Seneca Dam

rdf:langString Seneca Dam

rdf:langString Gated overflow at dam crest

rdf:langString United States

rdf:langString Maryland

rdf:langString Unbuilt

rdf:langString Seneca Dam was the last in a series of dams proposed on the Potomac River in the area of the Great Falls of the Potomac. Apart from small-scale dams intended to divert water for municipal use in the District of Columbia and into the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, no version of any scheme was ever built. In most cases the proposed reservoir would have extended upriver to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The project was part of a program of as many as sixteen major dams in the Potomac watershed, most of which were never built. The earliest proposals for exploitation of hydropower on the Potomac were made in the 1880s. By the 1920s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reviewed the possibilities for hydroelectric power. After a new study mandated by Congress in 1936-37, the Corps of Engineers in 1938 proposed a dam for flood control, power generation and water quality improvement, to be located above Great Falls at Riverbend. The scheme was revived following World War II. Opposition to the flooding of the entire river to Cumberland by a chain of dams, and to the inundation of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal doomed the Riverbend proposal. However, in 1963 the Corps proposed a new plan to improve water quality on the Potomac, which moved water storage off the main stem of the Potomac to its upper tributaries and scaled the Riverbend dam back to a lower dam at Blockhouse Point, near the mouth of Little Seneca Creek, to be called Seneca Dam. This proposal was debated through the 1960s until it was finally abandoned in 1969.

rdf:langString Concrete gravity

rdf:langString Location of the proposed Seneca Dam

rdf:langString Concrete gravity