IRRIGATION IN CALIFORNIA.
Nearly 40,000 acres of the best agricultural land in California will soon be irrigated from the big flume of the Stanislaus and San Joaquin Irrigation Company which will be completed early in September. Already the water has been turned into a part of the flume, and the extension of the system in all its branches is being pushed rapidly to completion. The whole work will cost about a million dollars. Beginning at a point six miles above Knight’s Ferry, the system extends to Lathrop and includes several important branches, one of them being fourteen miles in length. The work of making excavations has been a gigantic undertaking. For hundreds of yards without a break every inch of the rock had to be blasted. The rock varies from a soft sandstone that will crumble In one’s hands to a hard serpentine. Near Knight’s Ferry Is a dam that was built several years ago by the Han Joaquin latnd and Water Company. The sum of $5(1,000 was expended on this, and after spending $250,000 altogether on the project it was abandoned for lack of funds. It will lake about $12,000 more to complete the dam to the height the present company desires to build it. Work on this will be commenced in the fall. There will be three tunnels along the route of the ditch above Knight’s Ferry. One of the tunnels has been made for many years and Is known as the Schell tunnel. Another tunnel is 1,140 feet long, eight feet wide by twelve feet in height. The rock here is the hardest encountered anywhere, and every inch bed to tic blasted. The third tunnel is 1,120 feet long. The flume follows the natural waterways along u considerable part of its course. ,It has a capacity of 470,000,000 gallons a day. and it is expected that it will prove of inestimable value to the broad farming lands which it is destined to irrigate.
