HUGE WATER PIPES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 16, 19 July 1939, Page 13

HUGE WATER PIPES

PUBLIC WORKS SCHEME

SLIPS CAUSE DANGER

(By Telegraph-—.Press Association.)

ASHBURTON. This Day

Slipping country on the Surrey Hills has necessitated changing the course of the Raiigilata diversion race for a mile arid a half. A slip on the property of Mr. A. N. Grigg, M.P., contains a quarter of a million yards and is moving at ihe rate of an inch a day.

Yesterday the Minister of Public Works (the Hon. R. Semple) authorised a plan whereby, from a safe distance from the slip, the water will drop through pipes to country 100 yards below the level of the abandoned race and, under a thirtee-i-foot head, be forced up to the hillside race beyond the danger point. The pipes will be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, having an inside diameter of twelve feet. , The shell, in which probably one-inch steel reinforcements will be used, will have a thickness of ten inches.

The Department proposes to make the pipes at Surrey Hills. Each tenfoot section will weigh 23 tons. The change of plans . will .not delay completion of the diversion. The Minister announced that the Lake Tekapp storage development and hydro-electric power scheme would be begun in three or four months.