68 Kansas Academy of Science. 



In times of mild floods, however, dams certainly do produce bad 

 effects. They cause the water first to break over the river banks 

 above the dam, which in turn is liable to set up new channels, and 

 to flood certain areas which otherwise would not be disturbed. 



SPILLWAYS. 



It has been suggested that where dams are built spillways should 

 be provided around an end of the dam so that during mild floods 

 an excessive amount of water could flow past the dam without over- 

 flowing the banks above. This, under certain circumstances, would 

 be a move in the right direction. Its value would be made nil, 

 however, provided the channel of the stream below the dam was 

 not sufficiently wide to carry away the water as fast as it passed 

 over the dam and spillway combined. The production of a spill- 

 way beyond this point would be an unnecessary waste of money. 

 This question of dams and spillways is here introduced because 

 again the public press, from time to time since the flood of 1903, 

 has been agitating the subject, and great dissatisfaction and unrest 

 have been worked up with the masses of people living in the river 

 valleys in eastern Kansas and other parts of America. According 

 to press reports a government engineer recently has passed up and 

 down the Kansas river valley and its tributaries, counting the dams 

 across the various streams, and giving utterance to statements in 

 effect that such dams must be removed, after which damage from 

 flood will be a thing of the past. I wish to call attention to the 

 well-known fact, as before stated, that these same streams over- 

 flowed their valleys practically to as great an extent before such 

 dams were built as they do now. We have abundant historic evi- 

 dence of this covering the past fifty years, and we have positive 

 geologic evidence of this written in the flood-plains of the streams, 

 as already explained. It should be remembered, therefore, that 

 such dams may produce bad influences during mild floods, but that 

 these bad influences decrease as the floods increase in volume, so 

 that when the flood reaches the proportions of those of 1903 practi- 

 cally the dams' influences are almost nil. 



All too often it happens that attempts at river improvements are 

 made in the wrong direction. For a sad example of this, I need 

 only refer to actions of citizens at -Pine Bluff', Ark., in their attempt 

 to protect property from river destruction during the flood of the 

 Arkansas river only a few weeks ago. Here is a town situated on 

 the convex side of a bold ox-bow curve in the river. At flood-time 

 the current was constantly striking against the bank so as to increase 

 the crookedness of the channel. Opposite this part, along the con- 



