THE MANAWATU RIVER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1829, 21 May 1918, Page 2

THE MANAWATU RIVER.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE.

Referring to the Harbour Board Loan proposals in last night’s Palmerston Standard, “Yiritas” says, inter alia: —“There is another very important consideration connected with this question. It is of the utmost importance to this district. Thousands of pounds annually lie unused near or fall into the tortuous flood-course of the Manawatu river. The menace and waste approaches yearly to a catastrophe. Let us carry our imaginations a little further. The Manawatu river is an immense uuwicldly body of water. That body has two fixed points, and two only. The first where it emerges from the Manawatu Gorge, the second where it enters the sea at the river month. Let us take the first fixed point, the Gorge. The river issues frozn the gorge as a straight, steady stream, varying only in the height of its volume occasioned by the rainfall. It cannot emerge other than straight because it is confined by giant rocky walls, which (for practical purposes) cannot cither shift or decay. An immense mole erected a little distance from that exit could direct the stream straight us a compass towards Foxton Heads. From that initial straight direction (with an undeviating and constant force of central scour) every groin, every protection, every bank or work, could take its bearing; without fear that the flooded area, which always forms towards Ashhurst racecourse opposite the Gorge when the river is in spate, would alter the previous scour and render ineffective or make dangerous all the lower “guiding” paraphernalia. This guiding mole at the Gorge mouth is not yet a question of practical politics, yet those of us in middle age will seq small wlierries loading their goods by the Fitzherbert bridge and passing by a, simple electric wire overhead, .along a river 'canalised” on its course to Foxton. Instead of a great waste of shingle bed and dreavy bank, boat houses will flourish on the edge and children wave their hands towards the legendary paint-marks on the bridge as they row underneath —the marks Avhere the great floods of old reached once upon a time.”