Garrison Dam

We get a little slice of Mandan and then effectively Highway 83 all the way over to basically Golden Valley.

So every power plant, every mine, the Garrison Dam, All of that is within this district.

It's been home to me ever since I was born.

I grew up on a farm just a mile west of the Coal Creek Station.

The Missouri here isn't the river it was.

In the nineteen fifties, the Army Corps of Engineers built Garrison Dam upstream of Bismarck, and it backed the water up into Lake Sakakawea, nearly two hundred miles of reservoir.

Downstream, they built Oahe in South Dakota, and that lake reaches all the way back up into North Dakota.

So the free-running stretch of the Missouri in the state is really just the piece between the two dams.

She lives in Minot.

She said she's never once in her life put a boat on the Missouri, and her husband fished it for forty years and could never get her to go.

The breakup on the free-running stretch below Garrison Dam isn't what it used to be because the dam holds the water steady and the ice doesn't get the chance to build the way it did when the river ran wild.

But below the dam, in the tailrace and the first miles downstream toward Washburn and Stanton, it still freezes, and it still goes out, and in nineteen seventy-four, Gene was there when it did.

Mm-hmm.

So most of these fish are coming from Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery, uh, so we should be able to tell if that material in the center of their otolith matches Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery, or, uh, these fish that are sampled in a different lake, uh, does it match the water chemistry of Dry Lake-

Mm-hmm

... or Alkaline Lake instead?

Yep, so it, we, we won't be able to differentiate, using this technique with Garr-

Mm-hmm

... fish from Garrison Dam, we could not tell the difference between a fish raised at Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery and stocked in-

Mm-hmm

Again, worried about another attack.

Also taking steps to make sure that any security for, like, Garrison Dam, for power plants, any of those kind of things, in case there would be an attack there.

Coordinating with the Air Force bases.

The other thing, though, that is unique in our case, Jamie, is that our F-16s, at that time, our National Guard flew F-16s.