Development Act had tried to prevent. Governor Thompson’s de-

cision infuriated his colleagues in the Great Lakes Basin, who im-

mediately labeled him a turncoat. The idea that a fellow Great

Lakes governor would come out in favor of such a proposal sparked

a political maelstrom—particularly because this governor already

ruled over the largest and most controversial diversion ever to send

water outside the Great Lakes Basin. Governor Tony Earl of Wis-

consin still remembers how angry and incredulous the rest of Great

Lakes governors were. “Very early after the Charter was signed . . .

Jim Thompson came and said, ‘Gee you guys, we’ve got to divert

more water so we can float the barges [on the Mississippi],” Gover-

nor Earl recalls. “We all said ‘Jim go powder your ass!’ ”

Governor Thompson’s proposal even caught other Illinois offi-

cials off guard. “I was in St. Louis when that happened,” says Neil

Fulton, one of the governor’s top water managers at the time. “I

never got on a plane so fast in my life.” Contacted nearly two

decades later, Mr. Fulton was more than happy to distance himself

from the governor’s diversion idea, saying that he was not consulted

before the announcement was made. “That proposal was never

staffed,” Mr. Fulton says. “We just spent a lot of time picking up the

pieces.”

More importantly, Governor Thompson’s plan didn’t make hy-

drologic sense. Water engineers pointed out that while expanding

the diversion would affect water levels in the Illinois River, it

would have a nominal impact on the flow regime of the mighty

Mississippi—particularly by the time the additional water reached

places like Tennessee and Louisiana. “The Mississippi’s a huge wa-

terway, and the amount of water you could get from Lake Michigan

down there really isn’t that significant,” says Dan Injerd of the Illi-

nois Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “There probably

will never be another suggestion to try to use an increased diversion

to alleviate drought conditions on the Illinois or the Mississippi.”

Maybe so, but while Governor Thompson’s proposal went nowhere,

it was the kind of scenario that anti-diversion advocates had wor-

ried about for years: that during a period of severe, long-term na-

tional drought, panicked politicians from outside the Great Lakes

98

T h e G r e a t L a k e s Wa t e r Wa r s