Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 156, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 July 1919 — PROTECT THE MIAMI VALLEY [ARTICLE]

PROTECT THE MIAMI VALLEY

Work of Protecting Immense Reservoirs One of the Greatest Projects of the Kind. Were It not for the fact that the United States has been, engaged in the greatest of world wars, the building of the reservoirs as part of a flood-prevention plan in the Miami valley would arrest the attention of the nation, says Howard Egbert in Popular Mechanics Magazine. Further than that, international construction experts would be watching the work with considerable Interest, because the project is by far the greatest of its kind ever attempted in this country. The plan, of course, is to Insure permanent protection to the more than 700,000 Inhabitants living in the Miami conservancy district, a regipn following closely the Miami river, an important but not navigable waterway which threads its way through southern Ohio counties. The cost is estimated at $20,000,000. More than 2,000 men are required to complete the construction work, and three years as a minimum is the length of time estimated as necessary to carry out th' designs of the district. Five huge retention basins, or dry reservoirs, are being constructed, all of them now well under way. To construct any one of these dams means the digging, transporting, depositing and compacting of from 850,000 to 4,000,000 cubic yards of earth. For the Miami river channel the estimate is 4,000,000 cubic yards. Dams and river together will mean the excavation and transportation in’ all of some 13,000,000 cubic yards of earth. The flood-conservancy project consists of the dry-reservoir systenj( which, once constructed, will occupy five different tracts of land in the district. At unusual periods of high water it is designed to permit all overflow water to run Into these basins. They will be so stoutly constructed that they cannot break under pressure of millions of gallons of water. The river channel thus relieved of the additional burden of high water, will not be threatened, and the customary danger of banks breaking or is entirely eliminated.