Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1910 — NO RAIN FOR TWO YEARS. [ARTICLE]

NO RAIN FOR TWO YEARS.

l'Mip*fte4 Obstacle to the Success of an Irrigation Project. There is only one reclamation project in the United States that has been completed and is not in use. That is the Hondo project, thirteen miles from this city, says a Roswell (N. M.) dispatch to the New York Sun. It has been finished for two seasons, yet has not been of value to the farmers, for It has not caught a drop of water. The rains that formerly fell upori* the Hondo wastershed and kept the Hondo River full a good part of the year have not fallen at all the last two seasons since the completion of this $330,000 project, and the farmers are suffering. “It rained the year we were building the dam and kept the water so high that we had a great deal of trouble,” said Louis C. Hill, supervising engineer for the government, "but since its completion there has not been enough rain to drown a flea." As a result of the lack of rain the people who bought land under the project have suffered and the government has not yet turned over the dam And asked payment for it, for the officials say it would be a hardship to —lra the land owners take something

that was doing them no good and pay tor it when their lands were not producing anything. Therefore, the project, though completed two year*, la still carried upon the books of the reclamation service as “under construction.” . The Hondo River drains a large area In flood time, and fihformer years a great quantity of. water went to waste. The dam was constructed to catch this water, but none has come down since the completion of the dam and the land owners are sorely tried. There is another thing that troubles them and that Is what becomes of the small amount of water that flows In the streaiq all the time to within a few miles of the dam. There it disappears; just sinks into the bed of- the river in the gravel, and the farmers are beginning to fear that the same thing would happen in a flood. Consequently they have petitioned the government to go north about twenty miles and construct a cement lined canal down to the reservoir and see if the water that now sinks into the ground cannot be saved, and guard against a loss of flood water, if it ever rains again. The engineer says that while the canal might save the water now running In the stream they do not believe it will be necessary to Build the canal tor flood waters, as they believe a flood would carry enough silt to fill the holes—gyp holes, the engineers call them —meaning perforations through the large rocks forming the bottom of the stream below the gravel. This same trouble is experienced at the Avalon and McMillan dams of the Carlsbad project, but not to so great an extent