The Kumara Times. Published Every Evening. SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1881.

Kumara Times, Issue 1416, 16 April 1881, Page 2

The Kumara Times. Published Every Evening. SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1881.

A dim consciousness of the utter absurdity of the proceedings connected with the preparation of the plans for some of the 80-called public works in this district is gradually dawning upon the department which is responsible for the preposterous blundering which has been perpetrated for years past. We understand that in the second section of the Kumara sludge-channel the entire plan will have to be modified, so as to make the tunnel something like a work designed by intelligent beings. The original plan has been condemned by every practical miner in the district, and iu fact by all unskilled men who possess a single grain of common sense. It was reserved for the Public Works department to discover an entirely new method of constructing a tunnel—one which combined the maximum outlay, with the minimum benefit, while every facility was offered for the destruction of human life. Even now those who designed the wonderful work will sturdily maintain that they were in the right, and that the thousands of practical men who condemned them were in the wrong. But for all that, the plan of the sludge-channel is to be entirely altered. In addition to this it is stated, on what is believed to be good authority, that the Government, weary of the continuous experiments in the construction of a certain dam, upon a principle which involved its immediate destruction, have issued instructions of the most definite nature to try a new plan the next time. "Itis a long lane wbieh has no turning," and even the apparently hopeless stolidity of the Public Works department, may in a few rare instances, be galvanized into something, which if it does not exactly represent the common sense of ordinary mortals, still approaches neai'er to it than might be expected under the circumstances.