The Press Junior THURSDAY, August 30, 1934 Building Bridges

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21256, 30 August 1934, Page 4 (Supplement)

The Press Junior THURSDAY, August 30, 1934 Building Bridges

Within a few months the occupants of hundreds of homes in several town and country districts will be enjoying the use of electric power supplied by the Waitaki hydro scheme. A few miles up the river from Kurow a large lake will stretch over 2200 acres of river bed and lower banks above ■ the dam; deep water will llow towards the turbines over the ground where hundreds of workmen have lived in hutments during the last five years while the dam has been in construction. There will no longer be any hutments on the upper banks where the waters do not reach; many of] them have already been removed to be sold or to be used in other Public Works camps. The men who occupied them—as many as 1000 workmen at one timehave left to take up work in Borne other part of the country, instead of the 200 huts on the upper bank, and the small township that has flourished there during five or six years, there will be 11 permanent houses and a hostel to be occupied by the electrical staff of 20, including operators, linesmen, mechanical engineers and electricians. Visitors will be shown the power house with the huge turbines converting the water power into current; they will gasp at the enormous size of the structure and they will agree among themselves that here is proof of great engineering skill. But will they think of the thousand odd men whose hard manual labour was responsible for the building of the dam? Will they con-

>•>')rv the great hardships that had to be faced by the men who 'worked across the turbulent Woilaki in the dead of winter, They may be told of the kicks the angry river gave from time to time, but they will not realise just how grave some of the * set-backs caused by flood were. When they are sheltered by the missive power house building it will be hard for them to imagine the bitter cold of the winds that swept down the river in winter time; it will not impress them much to be told that the water froze as the men splashed it on the rocks or that those who worked with picks and shovels had to do so with braziers burning all round to help soften the hard-frozen ground. Yet these were only a few of the hard-s-hips suffered by the workers; the Waitaki dam was built by Tfien who had to work in all weathers, 011 night shifts or day shifts, in one of the windiest places in New Zealand. "The aj t of directing the great source;!' of power in Nature for_ the use and convenience of mankind" is the art of the engineer. He and his workmen build bridges or railways, or harness the waters of boisterous rivers away in the lough places of the earth. Those who enjoy the fruits of their work owe the builders a gesture .of homage.