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At the eastern end of the International Rapids, where the brawling river forms the boundary between Ontario and New York, two new dams went up—the dams that last week drowned the old rapids under a navigable lake 28 miles long and up to four miles wide. One was the St. Lawrence Power Dam. The other, the Long Sault (pronounced soo) Spillway Dam, stands across the old main river bed to divert water to the power dam and a bypass ship channel.
The bypass is the only major seaway works in U.S. territory. Going upstream from Lake St. Francis, ships will move into the Wiley-Dondero Ship Channel, rise a total of 90 ft. in the Snell Lock and the Eisenhower Lock ("Ike's dike," in seaway slang), pass on into the new, still unnamed lake. At the western end of the lake, a 5-ft. lift in Ontario's Iroquois Lock will hoist westbound ships into the calm waters of the upper St. Lawrence for easy steaming upstream to Lake Ontario.
Four Bosses. The administration of the seaway and power project looks clumsy—but has worked fine. The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and the Power Authority of the State of New York evenly shared the $650 million cost of the power project, will evenly divide the electricity that it produces. The Washington-chartered St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. administered all seaway construction in the U.S., while Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway Authority managed all seaway work north of the border. Industrialist James L. Duncan and Civil Servant Bennett John Roberts ran Canada's power and seaway agencies; Duluth Banker Lewis Castle and New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses were the U.S. chiefs. Because more of the work had to be done in Canada than the U.S., the Canadians will pay about 71% of the $440 million cost of the navigation works, collect the same proportion of all future ship tolls.
Geology and the northern weather provided rough obstacles. Along the Beauharnois Canal, contractors grated into sandstone so hard that it wore out drill bits in eight hours, had to soften the stone by firing it with kerosene torches at 4,000° F. They burned, drilled and blasted through two miles of solid rock. Partly to stabilize employment in Canada, contractors there kept up work at full speed through the winter months; they battled towering icefloes that threatened cofferdams, poured concrete in subzero weather, using jets of steam to keep it from freezing while it cured.
The Eighth Sea. The Great Lakes, long one of the world's busiest waterways, will grow even busier when deep-draft ships can steam directly from the ocean lanes into the ports of Toronto, Cleveland and Chicago in what trade promoters like to call the Eighth Sea, the Fourth Coast, the North American Mediterranean. The main payloads on the old 14-ft. canals — iron ore upstream from Labrador and wheat downstream to Montreal—will fill the holds of probably nine-tenths of the ships on the new canal. Seaway planners forecast a traffic load of 25 million tons on the new seaway next season—just double the old seaway's 13 million tons of 1957—and 50 million tons a year by 1968.