page_title: Coosa River
section_title: Impoundments and sections
hierarchical_section_title: Coosa River / Impoundments and sections
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo By Mike Cline, December 3rd, 1996
context_page_description: The Coosa River is a tributary of the Alabama River in the U.S. states of Alabama and Georgia. The river is about 280 miles long.
  The Coosa River begins at the confluence of the Oostanaula and Etowah rivers in Rome, Georgia, and ends just northeast of the Alabama state capital, Montgomery, where it joins the Tallapoosa River to form the Alabama River just south of Wetumpka. Around 90% of the Coosa River's length is located in Alabama. Coosa County, Alabama, is located on the Coosa River.
  The Coosa is one of Alabama's most developed rivers. Most of the river has been impounded, with Alabama Power, a unit of the Southern Company, owning seven dams and powerhouses on the Coosa River. The dams produce hydroelectric power, but they are costly to some species endemic to the Coosa River.
context_section_description: The following table describes the seven impoundments on the Coosa River from the south to north built by the Alabama Power Company as well as the tailwater section below Jordan Dam. Harvey H. Jackson III in a book Putting Loafing Streams To Work characterized the importance of the first Coosa River dams as follows:
  Prior to 1912 only seventy-two Alabama communities had electricity, but by 1928, when Jordan Dam went into operation, Alabama Power served four hundred twenty-one communities in sixty-one of Alabama's sixty-seven counties.  The company also provided power for coal and iron mines, cotton mills, cement plants, quarries, steel plants and rolling mills, foundries, pipe plants and machine shops, ice plants, public utilities, and electric furnance installations, industries that put thousands of [Alabama] citizens to work.
caption: Sunset Over Lake Jordan Near Weoka Creek, 1996.
exif: {}