American Forestry 



VOL. XVII DECEMBER, 1911 No. 12 



BUILDING THE WORLD'S HIGHEST DAMS 



By C. J. BLANCHARD 



Statistician U. S. Reclamation Service. 



^i^:^HE Reclamation Service in the nine years of its existence has worked out 

 V^ J to successful conclusions many interesting and remarkable problems of 

 engineering construction. Its works, being located generally in regions 

 remote from transportation, have presented numerous difficulties and obstacles 

 to overcome which ability and initiative have been required. The preliminary 

 work consisting of the building of roads, securing rights of way, laying out of 

 camps, and providing the supplies for thousands of men and teams in numerous 

 instances has called for extraordinary foresight and has presented problems 

 which were even greater than that of constructing the great structures for 

 storage and diversion. 



The Salt River project was notable in this respect. Preliminary to actual 

 construction of the big Roosevelt dam, the engineer had to survey a wagon 

 road 62 miles in length from the nearest rail transportation to the damsite. 

 For 20 miles this highway was laid across a waterless desert, the balance of 

 the route being through an extremely rugged mountain region. In the moun- 

 tain section this roadway stands today as one of the finest pieces of road build- 

 ing in the country. To obtain lumber for the camps and buildings it was neces- 

 sary to erect two sawmills in the national forest where several million feet 

 were cut. A water supply was secured by piping springs several miles away. 

 A large brick-making plant was established. Later a power plant generating 

 4,000 h.p. was erected and shortly thereafter the engineer set up a cement 

 mill which turned out more than 300,000 barrels of high-grade cement at an 

 enormous saving in cost. The labor problem here was partly solved by instruct- 

 ing 600 Apache Indians in the use of pick and shovel and in other forms of 

 common labor. These phases of preliminary work are cited to make plain the 

 fact that the completion of a large irrigation project in the arid West includes 

 many problems which are not found in engineering works of like character 

 in the East. 



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