Word: waterway
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President Nixon surprised and delighted conservationists last week by halting construction of the controversial Cross-Florida Barge Canal. About a third of the 107-mile-long waterway has already been built across northern Florida by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Cost to date: $50 million, a great deal of money to go down the drain. But stopping the project. Nixon said, "will prevent a past mistake from causing permanent damage...
Conservationists never saw the canal as anything but a huge environmental blunder (TIME, April 13). By connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, the 9-ft.-deep waterway would have saved shippers a 600-mile journey around Florida. But, as Nixon's Council on Environmental Quality noted, its construction would have inundated the Oklawaha River basin, a unique and beautiful area abounding in wildlife. Critics also charged that the canal would pollute nearby ground-water supplies and they insisted that the locks would be too small to permit profitable traffic loads...
...sovereign immunity." He ruled that the corps had in fact not complied with the National Environmental Policy Act. Now that Nixon has stopped the project entirely, the next step will be for government bodies and environmentalists to work out what to do with both the completed parts of the waterway and the condemned land along its route...
...years a special presidential commission studied possible routes for an Atlantic-Pacific waterway to replace the existing Panama Canal. A route along the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border looked appealing; so did one through Colombia. Last week, however, the commission recommended a 36-mile sea-level canal across Panama, only ten miles west of the present one. It will be able to accommodate all 150,000-ton ships as well as the U.S. Navy's 60,000-ton Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carriers, which are too wide for the present canal. The new canal will also have the potential...
...physical problems pale alongside the political ones, which have been festering since Panama's anti-American riots of 1964. While footing an estimated $2.9 billion construction bill, the U.S. will have to meet Panama's demands for a bigger say in operating the new waterway-and a bigger share of the revenues...