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Show THE VALUE OF WATER NEAR OGDEN. With the awarding of a contract to the Gillis Contracting company com-pany of Salt Lake for the concreting of five miles of the canal of the Davis & Weber Counties Canal company, another move forward has been made in the development of the agricultural and horticultural horticul-tural resources of this region. This contract calls for work aggregating $150,000 and it is but the beginning of improvements along the company's .property which are to total an outlay of $750,000. , The Gillis company is now hauling gravel to five points along the canal and on August 21, the close of the irrigation season, a great force of men will be ready to convert the waterway from a dirt: embankment, with a 12 per cent loss from seepage, to a conduit, cement ce-ment lined, with no appreciable loss of water and an increased capacity ca-pacity from 210 to 425 second feet. Contractor Doyle, who last fall completed one-half a mile of concrete on his two-mile contract, will also begin concreting on August 21, so that six and one-half miles of the canal will be the scene of great activity this fall, and eventually seven miles of the 9.4G miles will equal the aqueducts of the Romans. George Camp of Logan, who placed the original bonds which made possible the East canyon reservoir, which supplies the canal with water in the dry months, is now East negotiating the sale of bonds which will provide means for the building of a $300,000 power plant at Riverdale, having a generating capacity of 5,000 horsepower, horse-power, and for, the raising of the dam in East canyon 40 feet, doubling the storage of the reservoir. A few years ago when J. C, Nye, Engineer Bostaph and others approached the problem of securing more water for the Sand Ridge country to the south of Ogden, the .stock of the Davis & Weber Counties Canal company was changing hands at $12 a share and there were 4,000 shares. The canal was bonded, which with an increase in-crease of 2,000 shares in the capital stock, disposed of at the market price and the funds placed in the treasury, made possible the construction con-struction of a dam. Today the stock in .the irrigation company a farmers mutual improvement is selling at $175 to $180 a share. From the small beginning, involving a liability of less than $50,000, and almost without financial risk to themselves, the farmers along the canal have increased the value of their irrigation property to over a million dollars and are now making it the basis of an outlay out-lay of three-quarters of a million dollars. This, we have often said, is the best concrete example of the value of water storage to be found any place in the country. The cementing of the canal is another advanced step in water distribution, being a recognition of the fact that, if water is valuable, valu-able, it should be handled as such. The canal engineer has estimated a loss of 12 per cent by seepage. He also has figured a doubled carrying car-rying capacity, if the canal is concreted. With those figures reliable, the people financing the waterway have had something with which to appeal to the buyers of bonds and, as a result, money has been freely offered, not only to improve the canal, but to develop the water power of the big ditch. |