ROCKY MOUNTAIN RIVERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 October 1936, Page 8

ROCKY MOUNTAIN RIVERS

TO IRRIGATE BARREN WASTES. NEW YORK. August 24. The mighty task of harnessing rivers which run west from the Rocky Mountains into the Pacific and east into the Atlantic will be carried a stage further by two dams on the North Platte River, in Wyoming, work on which has been started this summer. Elsewhere in this region important steps have been taken by the Federal Government to make use of turbulent streams rushing through rugged canyons for irrigation and the generation of electricity. Boulder Dam, in Arizona, the greatest in the world, has been completed, and behind its masses of concrete a vast lake which one day will hold 30,500,000 acre-feet of water —the amount that would cover an acre to a depth of one foot —is slowly forming. Boulder Dam stands astride the which rises near the'North Platte River, hut flows south and west to the Gulf of California, instead of north and east to the Missouri and the Gulf of Mexico. The Seminoe dam on the North Platte River is being constructed .in a deep gorge. It will cost £1,700,000, and it will be about 540 ft. long and 260 ft. high. This dam will form a lake containing more than 1,000,000 acre-feet of water, which will be used principally for irrigation, but also to control floods and to produce power. The Alcova Dam, an earth-filled structure costing £700.000 will stand astride the North Platte river at the mouth of Alcova Canyon, 30 miles south-west of the town of Casper. When these structures have been completed, £1,500,000 will be spent on an elaborate system of irrigation canals, the longest of which will carry water 106 miles from the artificial kikes. They will make it possible to cultivate 65,000 acres of land that is comparatively barren to-day.

The whole project should be com; plete by the end of 1937, and farmers will be allowed to settle in this area as soon as irrigation water is available. Another great river-harnessing scheme in the American West is at Bonneville Dam, now being built on' the Columbia River in Oregon, where! it pours through the Cascade inoun-l tains on its way to the Pacific. It will J cost £8,000,000, and by the end of 1937 will be sufficiently far advanced to generate electricity and facilitate navigation. Even more ambitious is the Grand Coulee dam, higher up the Columbia River, in the State of Washington. Two! dams are projected here, one high, the other low. The latter is nbw under; construction, and 14,000,000 cubic yards of earth have already been excavated. ’ The total cost of the scheme will be at least £40,000,000, and it is claimed that the area of now arid land which will be irrigated will exceed 1,200,000 acres. This year’s drought will provide those who believe in Grand Coulee with a powerful argument.