THE COLORADO OVERFLOW.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 60, 14 September 1907, Page 3

THE COLORADO OVERFLOW.

FIGHT WITH A EIVER. According to Air C. A. Byers, the Colorado river has at last been successfully recaptured. This was one of the most remarkable instances on record of irrigation works getting out of baud. The trouble began in l'Mi. The Californian Development Company, needing' more water than its old irrigation ditch | gave it, made a fresh incision in the banks of the Colorado, near the Mexican boundary, and four miles above the old tapping point. Flood-times came, and the waters scoured a huge passage through the intake and rushed down into the great depression it was intended to irrigate. Seeking the lowest level at a place called Walton Sink, it formed an inland sea, of four hundred square miles, incidentally covering up some valuable mineral deposits and threatening ruin to the Southern Pacific railway. At times the entire flow uf the river was thus diverted. Seven attempts have been made to capture the runaway river, but it proved almost in impossible task. The first five efforts were quite futile. The sixth comprised a dam on a considerable scale. Over a thousand piles were driven iu and interlaced with willow matting, and against this was piled 70,000 tons'of rock, 100,-000-bags of sand, and a variety of other materials, making a dam of 170 ft wide and 3000 ft long. The job is said to have cost i:20OO a day for'loo days. But it had a short life, for within 33 days '.he river broke through again, in December, 1000, and the engineer seemed to have met his Waterloo. But the indefatigable American has conquered the river, it I seems, by sheer brute force. Technological methods were at a discount. It was . merely a question of dumping any available material into the breach too fast for the river to wash it out. Accordingly, a cartload of earth and rock wis dumped in every seven minutes of the twenty-four hours for thirteen davs, ami by February 10th the blocking 'up was complete. Some !iOO,OOO tons of material had been deposited, much of it hauled over 3M miles. Sixteen miles of , buttressing embankment are in process of construction, before which the irriga- i tion colony and the railway will not > feel safe. The cost mns into £700,000, 1 which is some faint indication of th 1 ' magnitude of the undertaking; and it ( is perhaps yet too soon to boast of its ' final success. J