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Show Big Elephant Butte Dam Will Curb the Rio Grande Floods The United States reclamation service has completed com-pleted by the building of the Elephant Butte dam a reservoir capable of Impounding 802.200,000.000 gallons of water. That is to say, within an artin-. artin-. clal lake 45 miles long and with a shore line of 210 miles, water enough will be stored to be spread a foot deep over an area of 4.2S5 square miles; or, if twice that depth, it would cover the -state of Delaware. The purpose of this water is to irrigate 1S5.000 acres in four valleys lying be- low the storage basin in New Mexico and Texas. While the dam itself is not so high as others In the United States for a kindred service, still the massiveness of the structure and the capacity of the reservoir make the. project not only the biggest big-gest thing of its kind in the United States but the most ambitious in the world. The famous Assuan dam in Egypt impounds only two-thirds as much water and cost $14,000,000 more than the Elephant Butte structure, or $19,000,000. Elephant butt Is -in New Mexico, about twelve miles west of Engle, and in order to carry materials to the dam site it was necessary to build a branch railway nearly thirteen miles long tapping the Atchison, Topelca and Santa Fe line. The government constructed con-structed this road and operated something like 11 fourth of It, and In this way saved $130,000 in freight charges alone. The dam Is built of great rocks buried in a mass of concrete and blocks a canyon on lhe Rio Grande. From the lowermost point of the parapet wall the dam rises 31S feet, and nearly a third of this is below the river bed. At its top the structure struc-ture has a length of 1,074 foet and on it runs a fine roadway 16 feet wide. The dam Is 225 feet thick at Its base and the entire mass, which called for 010,000 cubic yards of material, represents a dead weight of 1,000,000 tons. This strength ami Inertia are needed to hall the onrush of the erratic and the torrential Rio Grande and to hold the accumulated waters so that they may lie supplied slowly and safely to the widespread acre..- reaching reach-ing for 171 miles. Work was begun in 1911, and half of the succeeding suc-ceeding six years was taken up In preliminary operations before lhe great bulwark could l? reared. This preparatory work called for the construction con-struction of a great sluice to divert the river' (low and enormous bulkheads or subsidiary dams, above and below the permanent dam. The climate Is an equable one In the region opened lo the farmer, and the soil is abundantly productive when properly watered. A prnetlcul husbandman with $5,000 working onpltul has a splendid chance. |
