River Modifications
Dams, power plants and diversions of the Kootenay River, of which there are many, have been built for a variety of reasons throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The seven dams on the Kootenay serve many purposes, ranging from generation of local electricity to regulation of Columbia River flow between Canada and the United States. None provide for navigation or fish passage. In former times, the Kootenay would rise each spring and early summers with "enormous freshets that every summer flood the Kootenay River valley", but because of water regulation nowadays, such extreme variation in flow are no longer common on the lower river below Libby Dam.
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Famous quotes containing the word river:
“Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)