The Bismarck Tribune

OLD MAN RIVER IS HARD NUT TO CRACK AVERS KANSAS MAN

Tricky Character of Stream Forces Revision of Plans to Promote Irrigation

6.

'Belief that the state water conservation board had best confine irrigation activities along the Missouri river to experimental projects and those involving comparatively large acreages was expressed here Wednesday by George S. Knapp, Kansas state engineer, here for a six-month period as technical adviser to the board.

Knapp said the Missouri river is North Dakota's biggest, unused resource and offers tremendous possibilities but that it will be difficult to obtain the best results on small projects at reasonable cost.

Stream Is Tricky

The reason, he said, is the shifting character of the stream. The current may be on one side of the water course today and on the other side tomorrow. Thus, the only way to insure a water supply, he said, is to go out into the middle and install a permanent intake, as Bismarck has done for its municipal water supply. This, he pointed out, costs more money than can logically be assessed against a small irrigation project but would not be too large for a project involving several thousand acres.

As a result of Knapp's report, members of the commission indicated the activities of the state board will be directed toward interesting the Bureau of Reclamation in establishing large irrigation projects on the Missouri river bottoms, since large acreages could bear the cost of permanent intakes.

Will Promote Experiments

At the same time it will conduct experiments here and there in the Missouri valley to ascertain if some other solution for the water-intake problem may not be found. One suggestion which may be tried is the construction of small barges upon which pumps will be installed. The fear, however, is that a change in the current would leave both barge and pump high and dry and the farmer without water.

Pumping, Knapp said, is the only method which can logically be considered for irrigation in this part of the Missouri valley. The stream falls only 9 inches to the mile, he said, and the construction of diversion works and ditches would be too costly to warrant consideration.

In Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas where the waters of the Platte and Arkansas rivers are used to complete exhaustion and never reach the Missouri river at all, he said, the streams have a drop of five to seven feet per mile whereas the irrigation ditches have a drop of only two feet per mile. Because of this fact a diversion ditch reaches the highlands only a few miles below the diversion dam and it is possible to irrigate large areas cheaply as a result.

Difficult But Necessary

North Dakota can hardly be blamed for its failure to make use of the Missouri's waters in the past, Knapp said, because it presents a difficult technical problem. "Had it been easy it probably would have been done long ago," he explained. "The fact that it is difficult is what has delayed consideration of its use until necessity has driven the state to it."

Emphasizing the relative importance of the Missouri, Knapp pointed out that it annually carries 21,000,000 acre feet of water past the bridge at Bismarck. This is more water than is carried by any other stream in western America with the exception of the Columbia and nearly twice as much as is carried by the Colorado river on which Boulder dam was built.