Back in 1972 the Kootenai River Valley pretty much ceased to exist.
The Libby Dam was completed in 1972 as a joint project between the United States and Canada in an effort to provide flood protection and to generate hydroelectric power.
According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Libby Dam Project was a multi-purpose water resource development. Its purposes are flood reduction, hydro-power, recreation, and environmental stewardship.
Lake Koocanusa is the end result of the Libby Dam project. Don’t get me wrong here, Lake Koocanusa is a beautiful lake that extends some 90 miles to the north into Canada.
Everybody knows about Lake Koocanusa but not everybody knows about the Kootenai River Valley.
According to the old-timers it was a beautiful valley that was dotted with little towns and farms along the way. The construction of the Libby Dam changed all of that.
Northwest Montana towns like Warland, Tweed, Ural, Volcour and Yarnell disappeared from the map in those days with the exception of Rexford. In the late 1960s, Rexford incorporated in a last ditch effort to survive. The government agreed to let the town move to a new plot of land closer to Eureka. The construction of the Libby Dam meant that Rexford had to move for a second time. The first time Rexford moved was because the railroad came through about a mile from the original townsite.
Other towns along the way weren’t so fortunate.
As you drive north up highway 37 from Libby to Eureka, you might notice signs along the route that read, Volcour, or Yarnell, or Ural — These signs are a last indication that a townsite once existed along that route down it the valley. The towns of the Kootenai River Valley no longer exist. You can’t pull into the quick stop in Warland for a soda and you can’t get your windshield washed in Yarnell because as with the near entirety of the Kootenai River Valley these towns don’t exist.
Shadows of a portion of Montana’s past can even be seen over at bizapedia.com where the Warland Lumber Company would be 106 Years, 10 Months old just this year. Hard to believe, but yet here we are.
The direct history of the Kootenai River Valley is pretty lost it seems — The history might be so lost as a matter of fact that no one would even know, short of maybe a few family members, that Fred Good was born in Warland in 1923 and Gordon Griffith was born in Warland in 1939 or that Jim Davis died in Warland in 1953 and that 11 month old baby Linda Woodward died in a Warland house fire in 1951.
It’s unfortunate that I myself don’t directly remember much about the Kootenai River Valley. I was a young teen when the valley began to fill. I guess when you’re young you don’t pay too much attention to a lot of things.
Excerpt from the Missoulian August 22, 2004.
“Every evening, for weeks that stretched into months, Eileen Morey visited the grassy hilltop overlooking her childhood home.
She was marking time, her clock the rising waters that swirled around four tall trees in her front yard, slowly swallowing them whole. Inch by inch, branch by branch, the spruce trees, the homestead, the entire river valley slipped beneath the rising river, which was fast forming a lake.
“There was a terrible, terrible sense of loss,” Jim Morey said of the days when Libby Dam first plugged the Kootenai River Valley. “There were some real nice farms down there, great towns. Boy, just think what that would be worth today. That river was the prettiest crystal blue-green in the whole world; and that dam was about the ugliest thing you ever saw. I called it the concrete monster.”
Jim Morey is husband to Eileen, whose four trees were about the last left standing by loggers who stripped the valley before the river’s rise. “I miss it every day,” he said of his now-swamped hometown of Ural, where he was born in 1932. It was our home, and we let the government take it away from us.””
This is just one of the stories told from folks that actually lived in the Kootenai River Valley back in the day.
Though we didn’t live in Lincoln County, we sure had a bunch of family we would visit and as I recall, Libby was just a hubbub of activity back in those days with everyone going everywhere in relation to the construction of the dam.
Do you have memories of the Kootenai River Valley or have parents or relatives that were born in any of the towns listed above?
Sound off in the comments below and share your experience.
Thanks for the read.
Happy Trails.
Why limit health care competition?
West Virginia goes out of its way to block health care competition. Investors cannot open skilled nursing homes, launch opioid treatment programs, expand long-term care facilities or add residential beds for people with intellectual disabilities anywhere in the state.
Strict moratoriums criminalize all of these economic pursuits, even when doctors line up their own funding. Other health care projects are possible, but most entrepreneurial activity cannot move forward in West Virginia without a government permission slip called a “certificate of need” or CON.
Getting the piece of paper is not easy. Applicants must demonstrate a need for their services, meaning they must prove to the state’s satisfaction they won’t take market share from established providers.
If a startup threatens the status quo, then industry insiders can rally to squash the competition before it begins. West Virginia sanctions this interference. State law allows established providers to participate in the CON application process, giving them an official platform to sabotage potential rivals.
Business leaders in other industries would love similar veto power. The Home Depot could stop mom-and-pop hardware stores from opening nearby. Planet Fitness could block smaller gyms. And McDonald’s could push away rival burger joints.
Even when investors clear the CON hurdles, the process wastes time and money. “Conning the Competition,” a nationwide report from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, shows West Virginia CON applicants must pay up to $35,000 and wait two months or longer for government approval.
The report also documents an expansive CON regime in West Virginia unseen in many parts of the nation. California, Texas and 10 other states — representing about 40 percent of the U.S. population — completely repealed their CON laws years ago. Ohio, Indiana and Montana apply CON requirements only to long-term care facilities, and Arizona targets only ground ambulance services.
West Virginia, in contrast, targets just about everything. No other state maintains a moratorium on opioid treatment programs. And few other states enforce CON requirements in more categories of care. Until recently, West Virginia hospitals even had to navigate the entire CON process just to add ventilator services.
COVID-19 prompted 24 states and Washington, D.C., to adopt emergency measures, suspending their CON requirements during the early weeks of the pandemic. But West Virginia refused to budge.
The state passed its CON law in 1977, meaning government bureaucrats have been picking winners and losers in health care for nearly 50 years. The protectionism runs deep, but state lawmakers took a step toward leveling the playing field with Senate Bill 613.
The measure, which Gov. Jim Justice signed on March 28, scales back some of West Virginia’s most onerous CON requirements. The new law exempts birth centers, for example, allowing service providers to create these niche facilities without begging the state for approval. The law also allows hospitals to add services without a CON, and increases the expenditure threshold for requiring a CON from $5 million to $100 million.
Entrepreneurs will benefit from lower barriers to entry. Health care professionals will benefit from expanded job opportunities. And patients will benefit from increased consumer choice.
Ultimately, the entire economy will benefit.
The reform should be celebrated, but West Virginia still has far to go. The ultimate goal should be total CON repeal.
Hospital associations disagree. They claim CON laws are necessary to keep balance in the health care system, preventing redundant investments and reducing waste. Yet federal antitrust agencies debunked these arguments long ago. “By their very nature, CON laws create barriers to entry and expansion to the detriment of health care competition and consumers,” the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission concluded in 2008.
Decades of real-world experience confirm this finding. States without CON laws have more hospitals and surgery centers per capita, along with more hospital beds, dialysis clinics and hospices.
Why would West Virginia try to prevent this type of growth? Rather than artificially restricting health care investment, the state should kill its CON law and expand opportunities for everyone.
Jaimie Cavanaugh is an attorney and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va.
sourced: This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire