Good Engineering, Poor Management: The Battle Creek Hydroelectric System and the Demise of the Northern California Power Company (1995)
Reynolds, Terry S. (Author)
IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology
Volume: 21
Issue: 2
Pages: 5-24
Simple, dated inventories of equipment at abandoned or threatened industrial sites based on name-plate data and employee interviews can, when analyzed, provide key research questions for historical inquiries. At the Battle Creek hydroelectric system in northern California, such an inventory at the start of a HAER project provided the major historical questions that guided subsequent research on the system. This research ultimately led to the conclusion that the absence of improvements on Battle Creek in the period 1912-19 was not a cause of the owning company's demise in 1919. The absence of improvements was, instead, a symptom of nontechnological, managerial shortcomings, such as bad decisions about customer base, over expansion based on cyclical demand, costly and unnecessary competition, and misjudgment of the new regulatory climate. [1998 Norton Prize winner]
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