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3D Satellite)
The 1963 road across the top was removed in 2017 because a UCEB (Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridge) replaced it.
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TVA "Fort Loudoun Reservoir, located on the Tennessee River at Knoxville, is the uppermost in the chain of nine TVA reservoirs that form a continuous navigable channel from there to Paducah, Kentucky, 652 miles away....It has a flood-storage capacity of 111,000 acre-feet....Barges passing through the Fort Loudoun lock carry about half a million tons of cargo a year." |
The lock is just 360' x 60', but it has a 70' lift. "Fort Loudoun Dam is a hydroelectric facility. It has four generating units with a summer net dependable capacity of 151 megawatts. Net dependable capacity is the amount of power a dam can produce on an average day, minus the electricity used by the dam itself." [
TVA] When built, the dam had a nameplate capacity of 144.5 MW. [
GEO] The turbines have been upgraded because the current nameplate capacity has to be higher than the net capacity of 151 MW. And because a photo below shows one of the old turbines is on display. Upgrades began in 2008. [
news-herald]
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USACE The highway bridge over the dam was added in 1963. |
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Kevin Lackey posted J.E. Potter coming out of Ft Louden lock on the Tenn River. Robert Sampley: Good boat for its size. [To push three barges through this lock, the boat had to be less than 60'. A lot higher resolution via TSLA] |
The lock can hold just one jumbo barge and its towboat.
The gates are still opening in this photo. And we can see the new bridge.
This May 2018 capture shows the new bridge exists and the road across the dam has been removed.
The current Google Maps satellite image is rather old because the switch between old and new bridges was done in July 2017 and cost $71m. The TVA refused to let the old bridge stand as a trail bridge because it "deemed the structure unable to withstand a cataclysmic flood or earthquake and too costly to upgrade its construction." [
KonxNews]
The new US-321 bridge took a lot of curves out of the road.
Philip caught the dam spilling water. This is another reminder that 2019 was "wet" almost everywhere in the US.
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iidosee, Nov 2020 Note the old turbine. |
Note that they sometimes fine tune the spillage.
When the dam is not spilling water, boats get rather close to the outflow of the power plant.
They also dammed the Tellico River to force the water from that river to flow through the hydropower plant.
As part of that river diversion, they also dug a short canal between the rivers.
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Satellite, the canal is in the lower-right corner. |