On September 1, the first posts were hammered into the Yukon’s riverbed for the northern cofferdam. Thanks to the experience gained by work on the southern cofferdam, work progressed quickly. In addition, work was aided by the fact that the northern cofferdam was anchored to the southern section of the dam and thus required fewer anchors. On September 26, fewer than four weeks after work started on the cofferdam, the final watertight panel was laid in place in the eastern wall of the cofferdam. Though additional work still was required, the entire flow of the Yukon River now had to go through Rampart Dam. Before the river froze for the winter, the cofferdam was complete and drained. Throughout the winter, the hydraulic excavation techniques pioneered during the work on the southern portion of the dam were converted for use in the northern construction site with somewhat more success. The northern work site was larger, the bugs had been worked out of the system, and more workers were on the site.
Several thousand miles away, however, Rampart Dam again faced a threat to its future. In San Francisco, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, Natural Resources Defense Council, and several other environmental organizations filed suit in the United States District Court for Alaska. Their aim was to halt development of Rampart on the grounds that the dam would cause irreversible harm to the ecology of the region and that due diligence in researching the environmental effects of the dam had not been performed by the Department of the Interior. This research was required by the National Environmental Policy Act, which was passed by Congress in 1977, one of the first fruits of the more liberal Carter administration. Under NEPA, all federally funded projects and projects on federal land are required to draw up an environmental impact statement before work can proceed. The environmental organizations argued that NEPA required the federal government to create an environmental impact statement even though work on the project began before NEPA became law.
During the next nineteen years, the case percolated through the U.S. judicial system. Attempts at obtaining an injunction against continued construction were unsuccessful, and as court arguments continued, so did work on the dam. In 1983, Judge James Martin Fitzgerald of the Alaska District ruled against the lawsuit, saying that the Department of the Interior had used the best information available at the time. The conservation groups appealed the case, and in 1987, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Fitzgerald to review the case again. In 1990, Fitzgerald upheld his decision. Another appeal resulted in another trial four years later. This time, the appeals court turned down the conservationists’ case in its court. Not discouraged, the plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1999, fully five years after the Ninth Circuit’s decision, the Supreme Court decided to hear the case. In the decision Alaska Conservation Foundation v. United States, the court found that the Corps of Engineers used all available information and moved ahead on those grounds, not out of any willful neglect of the facts. Furthermore, attempting to apply ex post facto law violates Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly states that the federal government and state governments are specifically prohibited from passing ex post facto legislation. It based the decision on that section and on Bouie v. City of Columbia, which had a similar result in regard to ex post facto laws in 1964. Alaska Conservation Foundation v. United States has since been cited in Rogers v. Tennessee and Stogner v. California, cases in which ex post facto registration of sex offenders were ruled unconstitutional.
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