The Oklahoman Editorial, NewsOK
Published: July 5, 2011
IN the campaign season of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson flew to Oklahoma to dedicate the dam at Lake Eufaula. Nearly seven years later, the man who took Johnson's place flew to Oklahoma to dedicate the Port of Catoosa, the highest point of the 440-mile-long McClellan-Kerr Navigation System.
Lake Eufaula was one of several U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects built, in part, to provide flood control for the navigation channel. Eufaula could have been part of a visionary plan to make Oklahoma City a “seaport” along with the Tulsa area. The idea of making the Canadian River system navigable, as the Corps did with the Verdigris-Arkansas-White-Mississippi river system, quickly washed out. The Port of Catoosa has stayed high and dry, creating thousands of jobs and opening the Gulf of Mexico to northeastern Oklahoma barge traffic for the first time.
The port is now 40 years old. It was dedicated by President Richard Nixon on July 5, 1971, about six months after the first barge docked at the port. Nixon quipped that he enjoyed his visit to the “Oklahoma seacoast.” Yet few Oklahomans have ever seen the port, much less “sailed” down the navigation channel... FULL ARTICLE
Posted on
Tue, July 5, 2011
by John Cox