THE SIERRA TUNNEL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19448, 6 November 1925, Page 10

THE SIERRA TUNNEL

THIRTEEN MILES THROUGH A VISION REALISED. Th? vision of a great American engineer fulfilled, the immensity of rhe hydro-electric scheme of the Californian Edison Company for the supply of Los Angelos, the linking of one vast reservoir upon the Sierra with another reservoir by a tunnel through thirteen miles of granite, form the subject of a remarkable article by French Strother in the August number of the “World’s Work.” The scheme as described by the writer justifies even his eompari- : son of it with the Panama Canal in bigness of conception, difficulty of execution and permanent usefulness as an instrument of man’s progress. He prefaces his article with sketches of Los Angeles by night as the theatres close, folk return to their homes and lights flash on in thousands of houses, and a mountain scene 250 miles away to the north in the almost arctic stillness of the mid-Sierra. In a lonely barn-like concrete building, on a mountain slope at a mile’s elevation above the sea, a solitary watcher sits before an instrument board, hearing no sound but the hum of electric generators and the wash of waters in the tail-race below, lie sees a little needle on one instrument swing steadily to the right, and to him it means that an extra burden is being laid on the generators by the power used in the distant Los Angeles. Three hundred thousand horse-power of electrical energy is continuously developed in that lonely mountain region, and is carried southward across canyons and over passes, travelling through inch-thick cables, under terrific pressure, to drive the motors of industry and to light the homes of 1,000,000 human beings 250 miles away. Every pulsation of that energy is the transformed power of the falling weight of a drop of ocean water, which was first lifted into the clouds by the sun’s rays, driven eastward by the Pacific trade winds, congealed into snow by the cold upper airs, precipitated upon' the lofty Sierra summit, melted again by the sun, caught in artificial mountain lakes, led through man-made tunnels and penstocks, through man-made water wheels turning man-made generators, whose electrical power is carried to a city within sound of the ocean’s surf. John Eastwood, the original engineer, lived at least to sec his dream come true. He was superintendent of the city water works at Fresno, and he realised how mountain meadows could be dammed and made into lakes, and how their water led through tunnels to the brink of precipitous mountain sides, could be carried through steep pipe lines in controlled catarcats to turn water wheels to run saw mills. When the generation of electric power by falling water was perfected at Niagara, he altered his plans to use the Sierra water in this way. In 1896 he built the first hydro-electric plant of consequence in the Sierra, and carried its power to Fresno, 60 miles away. Then Los Angeles, outgrowing its near-by resources of electrical energy, reached north tor others. A company acquired Eastwood’s plans, improved technical details, but carried out his major ideas. Eastwood had as his assistant in his earlier work a young engineer, E. R. Davis, who became general manager of a large electrical company in Los Angeles. Then practically all the electrical interests of the region wore amalgamated in the Southern Californian Edison Co., and Davis was made, manager of construction to the enterprise. This work has involved 110,000.000 dol. already, and enormous expenditure will be needed to complete the remaining units.

In the system, as forcasted by Eastwood, the first great reservoir is Huntington Lake. Its water shed was insufficient to meet the growing demand for power, so Eastwood’s plan was followed by turning Florence Meadow into a lake, and piping its waters to Huntington. The difficulty of this task lay in the fact that Florence and Huntington are separated by a grange wall of mountains, called th? Kaiser Range, and the lowest pass between them. They had to be moved in the The pipe had to be a tunnel, 15 feet square, and thirteen miles long, blasted tnrough solid granite. At one point 1 this tunnel is more than half a mile below the surface of the earth. Every foot of Tiogress in cutting the tunnel' caused the use of one ton of supplies,; and the tunnel is 79,000 feet long. The prodigious quantity of blasting powder,; steel drills, food and other materials had to be transported from sea level to 5000 feet elevation by train over a tor- ' turously crooked railroad, and then by motor truck over a pass at 9300 feet elevation, to reach the men that used them. They had to b moved in the four or five months of summer, because the road over Kaiser Pass is 27 feet, deep in snow in the winter. Two thousand men worked fo/ and a half years to dig the Florence Lake tunnel. For many months in winter they wore snow-bound beyond the Kaiser Range, cut oil from the world, living in their own little city by nightand working by day underground to mine out the tunnel bore. The tunnel was finished last April, and another water shed was thus brought into man’s control. Co-operation and good will have seldom been better illustrated. When John Miller took the leadership in the electrical industry of Southern California, all public service corporations were under public attack on the ground that they were monopolistic. Through Miller’s plan, private ownership was to give way not to public ownership but to the ownership of the people, who bought the electricity. In a few years, by selling a share or two of stock apiece to the. housewives, merchants and farmers who bought his power, Miller transferred the ownership from the hands of a dozen millionaires to the hands of thousands of con sumers. To-day the stockholders of the Southern California Edison Co. number 70,000, of whom 63,000 are consumers.

Davis, too, showed outstanding ability in his management of the men while the work -was in progress. For example, he saw to it that the men found not the slightest cause for grievance in regard to the all-important food supply. He installed refrigeration plants in his camps for perishable supplies. He employed experts to get the best food that money could buy, and railroad dining car chefs to cook it, and dining car stewards to supervise the serving of it. No money was wasted on fancy tables or dishes, but everyfood was good food, in great variety, cooked by experts, and served palatabthing was kept scrupulously clean; the ly. A little touch of human understanding completes the picture of the reform in food. When a man comes up from the warm, still air of the valleys

into the mountain elevations, he develops an appetite that astounds him. Many of these men appear on the job. under-nourished from bad food, and plunge at once into hard manual labour. Their bodies simply shout for fuel. The company charged 35 (-01118 a meal, and they consequently deducted a dollar and a nickel a day from the men’s pay to cover the charge. At the end of the month the stewards found that they h:; ! served more meals than were represented by multiplying the number of mon by the number of days by three. They found that some of the men were eating six or seven meals a day. They reported this to Davis, and he found that these wore the new mon on the job. He promptly issued instruction.? 1 to say nothing to them. He argued

that if they ate seven meals a day. they needed them, and anyhow, thev were translating that extra bread and beef, by way of increased energy, and muscle power, into more pounds of rock per day dug out of Florence Tunnel. The scheme represents the power ' of a common vision of a great task, supported by a. sense of lively co-oper-ation of all men involved, and inspired bv an enveloping atmosphere of huinai personality and good will.