This book commemorates the first 50 years of the Tulsa District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in historical narrative and full-color photos. It oversized and has a coffee-table-book format, with a magazine-style layout and journalistic writing style.
The Tulsa District was born in 1939, in a region — parts of the Arkansas and Red River valleys stretching across parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Missouri — still choking on the dust bowl and, paradoxically, ravaged by floods and economic depression. Over its next five decades, the District would build and manage three dozen lakes for flood control, power and water supply, and similar uses, creating the world’s largest concentration of manmade lakes.
This book tells the stories of the people who made this dream a reality, as well as other projects such as the Arkansas-Verdigris Waterway. It explores the political machinations behind the decisions. The District had no small visions, and the changes were not created without cost — monetary, human, and environmental.
The book offers insights into the history of a region, its water resources, and its people.