If you think a small group of citizens can't get something done, look at Lake Conestee Dam

The dam at Lake Conestee, just south of Greenville, is getting replaced.

Four years ago, a sentence like that was nigh impossible.

It turns out that collective action (a.k.a. community-engaged democracy) is what got things going after years of inaction, frustration, finger pointing, and hand wringing over what to do about an antique dam holding back a passel of toxic metals flushed into the Reedy River over decades of Greenville’s Industrial Age growth.

And what got the collective action going were press stories (like this one that South Carolina Public Radio did four years ago) that served to inspire citizens like Ralph Cushing to bring attention to the possibility of an ecological catastrophe, and to spur state lawmakers from the Greenwood/Laurens region to get state funding behind a plan to head off such possibilities.

Cushing is a Greenwood resident who describes himself as a “type-triple-A personality” because he finds it too difficult to sit still. The problem was, he kind of had to because he was recovering from knee surgery and was relegated to haunting the internet. That’s where he came across news stories explaining what is at stake upriver in Greenville County.

To recap briefly: Lake Conestee Dam was built with a 50-year lifespan in mind in the 1890s, but is still standing. It is a genuine marvel of engineering, but its construction is a mystery today, as there are no known records of how it was built.

Without knowing the true nature of the dam’s construction, no one is really sure whether the structure could last another century or crumple under a stiff breeze – or an earthquake – by tomorrow morning.

Yet, for all the danger pressing up against that wall, Cushing had never heard of Lake Conestee Dam before his surgery. Neither had state Rep. John McCravy, R-Greenwood, nor state Sen. Billy Garrett, R-Greenwood, despite that the water that flows downriver from Conestee ends up in Lake Greenwood – the freshwater supply for much of Greenwood and Laurens counties – and that a release of enough toxic sludge to fill a football stadium upstream could effectively kill a set of communities two counties to the south.

Cushing and McCravy learned about the dam and its potential dangers around the same time, about a year-and-a-half ago. Cushing put together a Facebook group, Save Lake Greenwood, where he laid out what was at stake and urged a letter-writing campaign to lawmakers to raise their awareness.

And it worked. Dozens of letters a week, Cushing says, landed in the email inboxes and on the desks of McCravy, Garret, and state Rep. Stewart Jones, R-Laurens, asking them to find a solution. Jones told Cushing that the volume of letters was “significant.”

To either fix the dam or build a new one a few yards downriver from the existing one would cost anywhere between $40 million and $60 million, by most estimates; and multiple entities had long argued over which of them is the most responsible and who should flip the tab for a largescale project.

A major hang-up in figuring out who would pay how much was that there was no plan to do anything specific. Did the dam need to be shored up? Reinforced? Replaced? No one knew –partly because no one had done any work to figure out what was the best solution.

Garrett and McCravy figured it was best to get state funding behind what they saw as a genuine emergency first, “and worry about the rest later,” McCravy says.

Garrett lobbied hard for $3 million to find out the best way to deal with Lake Conestee Dam. That exploratory project did not use all the money before it concluded that the existing dam needs to be left in place and a new, 100-year storm-and earthquake-resistant structure needs to be built a few yards downstream.

Once that was identified, McCravy says, state lawmakers made a line item in the state budget last year, which ultimately came to more than $40 million. Further private donations to the Lake Conestee Dam Restoration Project means the project has about $47 million to build a new retention wall dam that would catch and hold any spill from a break, according to Kelly Lowry, the president of the Lake Conestee Dam Restoration Project.

Lowry picked up a decades-long fight to get the situation at Lake Conestee looked at. He also spearheaded numerous public meetings that drew hundreds of concerned residents to venues at which he outlined the dangers of a dam break and the need to keep the pressure on state lawmakers to fund a replacement wall.

For Lowry, news that state money has gone towards the situation is akin to at least a few sips of warm milk.

“I wake up at two in the morning thinking about this,” Lowry says, referring to the potential for a dam break. He’s feeling much more at ease now that seismic test engineers are running ground tests and laying out where the new dam will go.

He’s aware that until the new dam is built, anything could still happen. But the fact that Lake Conestee Dam is now being dealt with officially makes this a gratifying time for longtime advocates. While many in the communities that would be affected by a break only found out about the looming dangers upstream a couple years ago, advocates like Dave Hargett and other leaders of the restoration project initiative have been sounding the alarm for decades.

And what got it addressed, finally, was information, a little moxie from citizens and state officials … and mail.