CHAPTER VI. 

 STORAGE RESERVOIRS. 



General. Nature has indicated one satisfactory method of improving the navi- 

 gability of watercourses, in the lakes which lie at the foot of mountainous regions and 

 from which rivers flow. By them the length of the navigable season is increased and 

 the danger from floods is decreased, and the lesson taught is that where artificial lakes 

 or reservoirs can be constructed near the sources of streams, the waters falling in 

 the various basins leading to these reservoirs may be usefully stored up. Not only 

 will excess of water be thus held back while that entering lower down is making its 

 escape, thus preventing a flood, but it may be drawn out as required by the necessities 

 of navigation and to its great benefit. 



About the year 1800 Thomas Telford, a distinguished civil engineer of England, 

 wrote a work advocating the storage of flood-waters and urging its adoption for the 

 improvement of the navigation of the river Severn. His idea was "to collect the flood- 

 waters into reservoirs, the principal ones to be formed in the hills of Montgomeryshire, 

 and the inferior ones in such convenient places as might be found in the dingles and 

 along the river. By this means the impetuosity of the floods might be greatly lessened, 

 and a sufficient quantity of water preserved to regulate the navigation in dry seasons, 

 etc. This, it is thought, might now prove the simplest and least expensive mode of 

 regulating navigable rivers, especially such as are immediately on the borders of hilly 

 countries." Another English engineer, William Jessup, also gave the matter consid- 

 erable thought, and expressed the opinion that "rivers may be rendered nearly uniform 

 throughout the year by reservoirs." Mr. Rennie, however, also an English engineer 

 of distinction, ridiculed the ideas of Telford and Jessup in regard to the correction of 

 floods by such means. 



Charles Ellet, Jr., and Elwood Morris, both well-known engineers of their day, stren- 

 uously advocated the reservoir plan for the Ohio River. In 1857, however, W. Milnor 

 Roberts, one of the ablest authorities on river improvement this country has had, 

 carefully investigated the plan and made the following statement: "My own careful 

 investigation of the subject of controlling the floods of the Ohio by means of artificial 

 reservoirs satisfied my mind conclusively that such control by any human means attain- 

 able within the practicable limits of cost is impossible." Mr. Roberts gave his views 

 in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1857. He proved from an examination 

 of the records of the floods on the upper part of the Ohio, that some of the highest 



