A Deep Waterway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; Papers Before the Western Society of Engineers (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt: ...that no experienced engineer, who had in view actually doing the work for the money, would take the costs at less than 500 miles of bank at $30 per foot, or, say, $80,000,000 with $5,000,000 annually for renewals and repairs. However, even with a general bank protection given up, there is a continued call for large expenditures in this line, protecting concentrated values on town fronts, and special bends that threaten a a cut off. But how far the river, left free to change its course at will in the reaches above, will come in time to flank these local works and cut them all out is still a problem. With the system of bank protection given up, of course channel work for the improvement of the low water navigation goes with it. For, as before noted, to put such works in the river without at the same time holding the river in its. place, is to put them where they can do no permanent good, and may come to be very much in the way, if they are not cut out by the river in its channel changes. The question of whether any material improvement to navigation in this river could be gotten at reasonable cost by works of this character has, therefore, as yet hardly been touched; but as it is barred at its beginning by the excessive cost of bank protection, it is not much of a practical question anyway. But government works on navigable rivers can hardly ignore the interests of navigation altogether, and to meet the case thus presented a very extensive system of dredging low water channels has been inaugurated. The task is admittedly an endless one, for each high water obliterates the work of the low water season preceding it. But as a development in hydraulic dredging, and for the capacity attained of moving large quantities of this bar material in short times, it is cer...