the J. Carmichael Greer Bridge atop Fort Loudoun Dam and connected the area to Interstate 75 and Interstate 40 to the north and to Maryville and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south. US-321 intersects U.S. Route 11 just over a mile north of the dam in Lenoir City. Interstate 140 and several federal and state highways cross Fort Loudoun Lake further upstream. A new bridge south-east of the dam was completed in the summer of 2017 and now carries Parkway traffic across the river. Capacity and dimensions Fort Loudoun Dam is high and stretches across the Tennessee River. The reservoir has of shoreline, of water surface, and a flood storage capacity of . The dam is equipped with a lock that raises and lowers boats about between Fort Loudoun Lake (upstream) and Watts Bar Lake (downstream). There are four hydroelectric generators at the dam with a combined generation capacity of 155.6 megawatts of electricity. To augment Fort Loudoun's power production capacity, water from the Little Tennessee River is diverted into Fort Loudoun Lake via a short canal extending from Tellico Reservoir a short distance upstream of the nearby Tellico Dam. The canal is roughly a half-mile long and effectively creates an island with Fort Loudoun Dam at its northeastern tip and Tellico Dam at its southwestern tip. The canal also allows navigation by barge-size craft between the Tellico Reservoir and Fort Loudoun Lake. Background and construction In the mid-1930s, TVA drafted its "unified plan," a series of long-term goals that called for the construction of a series of dams along the Tennessee River to provide a minimum navigation channel along the entire length of the river, control flooding in the Tennessee Valley, and bring electricity to the area. The Fort Loudoun project was initially known as the Coulter Shoals project, named for a site identified by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers upstream from the present dam site in the early 1930s. After surveying the area, TVA moved the project to the Belle Canton Islands. The TVA proposed the project in 1939 and it was authorized on April 18, 1940. Construction began on July 8, 1940, using much of the construction organization that had been used in previous months on TVA's Hiwassee River projects. TVA originally planned to complete the dam in 1944, but the outbreak of World War II brought increased funding and urgency, and the