THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



11 



flow. It is true that here and there we have main- 

 tained flow measurement stations, but that informa- 

 tion is in no wise conclusive. You cannot find out 

 from an engineer today what are the run-off habits of 

 any particular stream in the Mississippi basin, unless 

 he comes down to the great big stream where the run- 

 off habits are very easy to ascertain. There is an 

 enormous engineering question in connection with the 

 run-off habits of every stream and their relation to 

 flood in the lower stream. We know nothing- about 

 it. We have just begun to scratch the surface. 



Now, whether or not flood levees are the proper 

 thing on the lower Mississippi, and flood levees alone, 

 possibly is difficult to say. We have heard ideas but 

 we cannot today demonstrate in a rational engineering 

 fashion whether those levees are going to do that 

 are now projected are going to be high enough or 

 whether they are going to be too low. All through 

 the middle of that valley the levees have been con- 

 tinually raised a new standard has been set. The 

 people in the lower valley have settled themselves 

 down behind those levees with a feeling of comfort 

 and security, .only to find in a few years that the 

 levees must be raised a bit higher. Last spring we 

 had a terrible flood, the greatest in history of man, 

 and yet it is perfectly apparent that another much 

 higher flood may come and probably will come ; so 

 where are we going to stop. There is another thing 

 with reference to levees that I want to call atten- 

 tion to. Take, for example, Cairo, Illinois. The 

 flood height there was the greatest since the record 

 began, and the reason why it was not higher was be- 

 cause the levee system broke. The same is true at 

 Memphis and all down the river, and the safety of 

 the cities on the lower Mississippi river in the last 

 flood was due largely to the fact that their system 

 of flood protection failed. Ask any man in Memphis 

 who owns property whether he was glad or sorry 

 when the St. Francis levee burst. If he is a candid 

 fellow he will tell you he was very glad, especially 

 if the water was very near his property. 



Now, we have heard a great deal in recent years 

 about reservoirs in the highlands. I believe in reser- 

 voirs. I have been unable to find a case where reser- 

 voirs have not been a benefit when properly con- 

 structed and when not attended by disaster, and it 

 lias fallen in my way to defend, as well as I could, 

 the reservoir idea, and in some cases not altogether 

 in a friendly way, and we find that when the levee 

 man or the man who is opposed to reservoirs wants 

 to play his final big card he talks about reservoirs 

 failing and inundation and loss and death. Well, 

 that is a fetching argument ; there is something spec- 

 tacular about it. We have poems and songs and al! 

 kinds of horrible examples before us, yet if we pur- 

 sue the matter a little we will find that there has been, 

 after all, only a few reservoir failures in the United 

 States, and the fatalities compared with other sources 

 of fatality are practically insignificant. More people 

 have been killed in walking the streets of Chicago 

 than have been killed by reservoir failures. Those 

 figures are easy to demonstrate, and whenever we find 

 a reservoir failure we find a poor case of engineering 

 or a poor example of construction, criminal in fact 

 if not in law, and when you go back to the Johnstown 

 disastev and try to make a case against reservoirs you 



are going back to a mud bank which never should 

 have existed. Now, we have losses in steamships, 

 fatalities on railroads, fatalities in connection with 

 everything else, and yet we are still building rail- 

 roads, and steamships are now being built that are 

 larger than the Titanic was. The fatalities after all 

 are part of the price that we must pay for the social 

 and economic advantages. If we did not take that 

 view of it we would all be crouching in the open 

 country shaking with apprehension. Briefly, there 

 are two methods that are now being agitated with 

 reference to river regulation ; neither one of them is 

 a panacea. If water is held back in the hills by reser- 

 voirs less floods will c,ome down to the lower valley, 

 unless perchance the flood itself rises in the lower 

 valley and that is extremely rare, and such floods are 

 usually almost always without disastrous effect. 



Hold back the water in the hills ; I believe in 

 that, and it is possible to render the lower Missis- 

 sippi valley free from floods that arise in the Ohio 

 and upper Mississippi rivers, for in those two basins 

 there is sufficient storage capacity to make floods 

 free from danger in those two streams, and, of course, 

 when the Mississippi valley is not flooded by reason of 

 floods in those two upper valleys then the lower val- 

 ley must always benefit from those reservoirs. In the 

 Missouri basin, in the Arkansas and in the Red we 

 have no such favorable reservoir sites, therefore 

 levees will always be necessary in the lower Missis- 

 sippi. It is not possible to get away from that. 



Now, if I have given you any information on the 

 subject or expressed any ideas it has been this, if you 

 look at the matter from the standpoint of the lower 

 Mississippi, there is nothing to it but levees ; if you 

 look at it from the standpoint of the upper Missis- 

 sippi or the Ohio, there is nothing to it but reservoirs, 

 so I say that is the logical, the patriotic and the 

 scientific way to take this matter. It is the way that 

 you would take up the rejuvenation or the reorganiza- 

 tion of your own business go into all of it. It is a 

 national matter and must be handled by the National 

 Government ; and therefore the first thing to be done 

 is not to build reservoirs or to put up high levees, but 

 to sit down in a broad-minded way and look at the 

 whole thing in the face, and when that is done I 

 think we will see there is a large amount of merit in 

 both propositions. Reservoirs are worth while. Sup- 

 posing they did not benefit the lower valley at all, 

 they are worth while to this nation. Water that is 

 wasted in floods is sufficiently valuable to more than 

 pay the cost of reservoirs. There never was a reser- 

 voir built that I know of that did not pay for itself 

 by its benefits. I am talking about real reservoirs 

 and not makeshifts. The increase in water power 

 alone is sufficient to pay for the reservoirs. The in- 

 evitable benefit to navigation by reason of the relief 

 of those flood waters during dry seasons is suffi- 

 cient to pay for the reservoirs, so I think that whether 

 we consider the lower valley or not we may disre- 

 gard all the levees and all that lower valley and the 

 reservoir proposition stands on its own bottom and it 

 is justified by its own inevitable benefit. 



Now, we all admit that levees in the lower valley 

 are the proper thing the necessary thing. If we 

 had the reservoirs in the high lands it is probable, it 

 is certain, that the levees would not have to be so 



