Henry Liu is a rising junior at Yale University.
About 40 miles south of Nashville, on a river recognized as one of the most biodiverse in the world, stand the remains of a failed dam that just won’t stay dead.
Emotions are running high as a movement to complete the long-abandoned Columbia Dam on Tennessee’s Duck River gains momentum, despite equally intense opposition. At the heart of the battle is a problem faced by fast-growing regions around the country: how to provide resources for an influx of new power-draining industries and residents while protecting the environment.
There’s no question that many of these communities are going to need more water in the future. But new dams are not the only, or even the best, answer.
The Duck River provides a good example. Its basin, winding through seven counties south of Nashville, is experiencing rapid development, including more than $4 billion invested in General Motors’ Spring Hill manufacturing complex.
Growth has brought thousands of new jobs to the region. It also has required siphoning more water from the Duck. In January, officials in Columbia, the largest city on the river, approved $520 million for an upgraded water intake system that will withdraw an additional 12 million gallons of water a day.
But that is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
The Columbia Dam was first proposed in the 1960s by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and construction began in 1973. But in 1980 the U.S. House Committee on Government Operations determined that the dam “would destroy significant farmlands and fish and wildlife habitats” and was “not in the public interest.” Construction was halted in 1983, after the dam was about 45 percent complete and 12,800 acres had been acquired for the reservoir. The unfinished structure was demolished in 1999.
The process left many residents bitter — they never received the lake they had been promised, and land acquired for the project was never returned, instead becoming a wildlife management area.
Jason Gilliam, whose grandparents lost some property, is chairman of Columbia Dam Now, a group founded in 2025 to argue for the dam’s reconstruction. He is also chair of the Maury County Republican Party and a board member of the Maury County Water System. “We are in a water crisis and we need a long-term viable water solution,” Gilliam told me, adding that the lake would draw tourists and boost the local economy.
But opponents point to its high cost and the thousands of acres that would still need to be seized, in addition to adverse consequences on the river’s biodiversity. “At over $3 billion and as much as $7 billion,” April Grippo, director of water resources at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, told county commissioners, the dam “is the most expensive, the least likely and the most damaging water supply alternative of the dozens that have been considered.”
One of those alternatives is getting water through a pipelinefrom the much larger Tennessee River. This would draw environmental criticism, but it wouldn’t transform the Duck the way a dam would. And it would be far less expensive.
Sarah Gilliam (a distant relative of Jason Gilliam) is an administrator of a Facebook group called Don’t Dam the Duck, and she told me the dam failed in the 1970s because the area’s terrain is karst — land formed when soluble rock, such as limestone, dissolves over time. It is riddled with underground streams that make it difficult for a reservoir to retain water.
In November 2024, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) created the broad-based Duck River Watershed Planning Partnershipto explore water supply approaches. Notably, when the group issued its initial report last November, the Columbia Dam was not among its 18 recommendations. A new water pipeline was.
Yet proponents seem unwilling to give up the fight. In February, U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles (R) filed legislation seeking a feasibility study of dam reconstruction. In June, the Maury County Commission voted 16-1to request $3 million from the state for that purpose.
But the age of American dam-building is over. The average dam in this country is 65 years old. Most of the prime sites were exploited during the New Deal era, when steep, impermeable terrain in sparsely populated areas allowed for the construction of deep, stable reservoirs. The TVA did vital work in the 1930s and ’40s, bringing electric power to rural areas and taming the flood-prone Tennessee River.
By the 1970s, however, the authority was building what the House committee called “increasingly marginal” projects. It has not built a new dam since 1979. Today, America is building fewer dams than it removes.
The attempt to build the Columbia Dam was part of a misguided mid-20th-century legacy. Americans shouldn’t reach back to it for 21st-century solutions.
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