St. Lawrence Seaway: "Operation Inland Seas" 1960 US Navy; narrated by Glenn Ford

• Report rights infringement
• published: 20 May 2013
• views: 5707

more at http://quickfound.net/ "The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, allowing large ships to transit from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. That summer, the U.S. Navy launched Operation Inland Seas, a massive public relations tour of the lakes by ships from the Atlantic Fleet. This 1960 documentary, narrated by Glenn Ford, tells the story." US Navy film MN-9462 Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Inland_Seas Operation Inland Seas (or Sea) was a United States Navy operation to celebrate the completion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. Task Force 47 (TF 47), a 28-ship detachment of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Edmund B. Taylor, sailed up the Saint Lawrence River to participate in the official opening of the Seaway by Queen Elizabeth II of Canada and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on June 26, 1959. Thereafter, the ships visited ports throughout the Great Lakes, sometimes escorting Queen Elizabeth aboard HMY Britannia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_Seaway The Saint Lawrence Seaway (French: la Voie Maritime du Saint-Laurent), is the common name for a system of locks, canals and channels that permits ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, as far inland as the western end of Lake Superior. The Seaway is named for the Saint Lawrence River, which flows from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. Legally, the Seaway extends from Montreal, Quebec, to Lake Erie, and includes the Welland Canal. This section downstream of the Seaway is not a continuous canal, but rather it consists of several stretches of navigable channels within the river, a number of locks, as well as canals along the banks of the St. Lawrence River to bypass several rapids and dams along the way. A number of the locks are managed by the Canadian Saint Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation and others are managed by the American Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation... History The Saint Lawrence Seaway was preceded by a number of other canals. In 1871, locks on the Saint Lawrence allowed transit of vessels 186 ft (57 m) long, 44 ft 6 in (13.56 m) wide, and 9 ft (2.7 m) deep. The Welland Canal at that time allowed transit of vessels 142 ft (43 m) long, 26 ft (7.9 m) wide, and 10 ft (3.0 m) deep, but was generally too small to allow passage of larger ocean-going ships. The first proposals for a binational comprehensive deep waterway along the St. Lawrence came in the 1890s... In the post-1945 years, proposals to introduce tolls still could not induce the U.S. Congress to approve the project. Growing impatient, and with Ontario desperate for hydro-electricity, Canada began to consider "going it alone." This seized the imagination of Canadians, engendering a groundswell of St. Lawrence nationalism. Fueled by this support, the government of Louis St. Laurent decided over the course of 1951 and 1952 to construct the waterway alone, combined with the Moses-Saunders Power Dam (which would prove to be the joint responsibility of Ontario and New York: as a power dam would change the water levels, it required bilateral cooperation). However, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations considered it a national security threat for Canada to alone control the deep waterway, and used various means - such as delaying and stalling the Federal Power Commission license for the power aspect - until Congress in early 1954 approved an American seaway role via the Wiley-Dondero Act. Canada, out of concern for the ramifications of the bilateral relationship, reluctantly acquiesced... The seaway opened in 1959 and cost C$470 million, $336.2 million of which was paid by the Canadian government... There are six locks in the Saint Lawrence River portion of the Seaway... The seaway is important for American and Canadian international trade. Annually the seaway handles 40 to 50 million tons of cargo. About 50% of the cargo carried travels to and from international ports in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The rest comprises coastal trade between various American and Canadian ports... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMY_Britannia Her Majesty's Yacht Britannia is the former Royal Yacht of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. She was the 83rd such vessel since the restoration of King Charles II in 1660. She is the second royal yacht to bear the name, the first being the famous racing cutter built for The Prince of Wales in 1893. She is now permanently moored as an exhibition ship at Ocean Terminal, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland...