Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1908 — River Work of the Future. [ARTICLE]

River Work of the Future.

Contractor B. J. Moore of the river drilling and blasting work, has found the water too cold to longer pursue the work and called a halt after Thursday’s work was done. This work will not be started again until next spring. There* will be about 1,000 feet of rock bed to be drilled and blasted ’at the Grant riffles and a great amount of the other work will have to be gone over by hand, as there are protruding rock ledges from either bank that the dredge dipper could not get out. There was also a strip about 30 feet wide and extending across the river above the stock farm bridge that had, to be lowered some two feet and this was being picked and shoveled out when the work was called to a halt Thursday.' The rock ledge above the Gangloff bridge is a serious matter and it fs probable that the cost of removing the rock there will be near >7,000. This ledge was not discovered when the survey and specifications were made and therefor it was not incumbent on the contractors to take it out. Since it was passed the dredge has plowed its way down the river through town and four bridges have been taken out and replaced. This makes it impossible to take the big dredge back there and the work is too ponderous to be undertaken by hand. ..It is probable that the muck will have to be recleaned out of the river up by Burk’s bridge and that a small dredge will have to be put in the river to take that out, but there are three frame road bridges and the Monon railroad bridge between that point and the rock ledge and the dredge could not be brought there for a less cost than $2,000. So it is probable that the contractor who bids in that work will have to put a dredge in there to do it E. G. Sternberg, the junior member of the Sternberg dredging firm, says that he has figured every means of getting out the rock, one being to buy land and dig a temporary ehanuel around the permanent channel, run the water around and drain the permanent channel while the rock was being blasted.

It is a serious proposition and will cost several thousand dollars to solve and the drainage .will never be a success until that ledge is removed. The water now lays low In tr e c. annel of the river through town jind if the water were not held back by the dredge it is probable that the river bed would be practically dry through Rensselaer, and tle.efore something like six or eight feet Lelow the old river channel. The city drdinage will be greatly improved, and it is probable that the water in town will never get as high again as .it has in past years, but the scheme will never be a complete success until the lower river is dredged and it is not improbable that an effort will be made to secure that ditch next year.

As it costs something like >20,000 to build a dredge as large as the one now working below Rensselaer, the Sternberg Company would be In shape to dig the lower channel cheaper before the dredge is removed than it would be after.

A test of the rapidity with which the low lands down river will overflow will come next spring and if the theory of Adam Nagel and others is right the continuation of the ditch will be the only thing that will sate that country. As John J. Lawler now owns the former Monnett land itlsexoected that he will favor the ditch extension.