LAKE ROOSEVELT The Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Reclamation Project

WHERE THE MONEY GOES

Over 6,000 men have been employed on the project at one time, at an average wage rate of 83 to 90 cents per hour. Employment is limited to a maximum of 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week.

In the first 37 months of construction operations, the contractor paid out $18,615,617.48 in wages. In the first 15 months after beginning operations, the firm spent for equipment and supplies $11,413,628.63, of which 56-1/2 percent went directly to points east of the Rocky Mountains. Of the remainder, large parts passed through the hands of western jobbers to eastern manufacturers, and thence to their employees, and through western corporations to eastern stockholders and manufacturers. Much of the wages of all western workers goes east for the purchase of staple foods, clothing, automobiles, household equipment, and miscellaneous requirements.

The Government expenditures during 1935 and 1936, for materials, equipment, and supplies for the project, went directly to 23 States east of the Rocky Mountains and to 5 States west of the Continental Divide. In 1937 Government purchases for the dam were made in 34 States. Indirectly, the funds expended probably reached every State in the Union.

Through each 18-foot penstock water will pass at a rate of 141 tons per second to drive a loaded generator

DESIGN, SUPERVISION, CONSTRUCTION

The Grand Coulee Dam was designed, and the Columbia Basin irrigation works are being designed, by the Bureau of Reclamation, United States Department of the Interior.

The contractor an the construction of the base of the dam was the Mason-Walsh-Atkinson-Kier Co., made up of the Silas Mason Co. with headquarters in New York, the Walsh Construction Co. of Davenport. Iowa, and the Atkinson-Kier Co. of California, and commonly known as the MWAK Co.

The contract for the completion of the dam was let by Secretary Ickes on January 28, 1938, to the Consolidated Builders, Inc. It is composed of the members of the MWAK Co.; the Morrison-Knudsen Co., Boise, Idaho; J. F. Shea Co., San Francisco; McDonald & Kahn, San Francisco; Pacific Bridge Co., San Francisco; Henry I. Kaiser, Oakland, Calif.; and Utah Construction Co., Ogden (the firms included in the Six Companies, which built the Boulder Dam); and the General Construction Co., Seattle, which built the Owyhee Dam.

Supervision and inspection of the work are under the direction of Secretary Harold L. Ickes of the Department of the Interior and Commissioner John C. Page of the Bureau of Reclamation, and are carried out by Chief Engineer Raymond F. Walter of the Bureau of Reclamation, with headquarters at Denver, represented by Construction Engineer Frank A. Banks in charge of the field office at Coulee Dam, Washington.

Among the activities of the Bureau has been a surveying project of extraordinary magnitude. The reservoir flood-line and the taking-line at elevation 1,310, each nearly 400 miles long, were established, property lines were relocated, and new locations for highways and railroads within the reservoir were worked out. Surveys on project lands have included, so far, section-line retracement and the setting of monuments on more than a million acres of land, control-leveling on more than three quarters of a million acres, and topographic surveys of nearly as much.

Three deep gorges and numerous minor irregularities were found at the bottom of the 18-million-yard excavation

The purpose of the west cofferdam and the design of the diversion gaps on the west side are explained

Its tremendous size is illustrated by showing scale models of motor stages and freight trucks on the dam

THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION

The Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior is the Federal agency organized in 1902 to carry out the provisions of the Reclamation Act, "Appropriating the receipts from the sale and disposal of public lands in certain States and Territories to the construction of irrigation works for the reclamation of arid lands."

In the 35 years of its existence the Bureau has built 138 storage and diversion dams, 24 power-houses, 2,344 buildings, 19,116 miles of canals, ditches, and drains, 72-1/2 miles of tunnels, 4,367 miles of telephone lines, 267 miles of dikes and levees, 6,041 flumes, 18,694 culverts, 13,166 bridges, and 182,964 other irrigation structures.

Living on the land made productive by these structures are 210,466 persons, and in the towns on the projects 653,441, served by 859 schools and 996 churches. The estimated gross value of the crops produced on Federal reclamation projects in the calendar year 1936 was $136,502,480. The average crop value for each of the 2,901,919 acres of land for which the Bureau of Reclamation furnished water in 1936 was $47.10.

Since 1906, when the first Federal project went into operation, the grand total value of crops produced on these projects has been $2,311,983,242, or approximately 10 times the cost of the Federal irrigation works serving the lands. The return obtained by the farmer on Federal reclamation projects for each acre worked during 1936 was two and a half times that received by the average farmer the Nation over.

Although the 1936 production from Federal reclamation projects was only 1.1 percent of the value of all the crops harvested from farms in the United States, approximately 864,000 people, on 48,773 farms and in 257 towns and cities which have sprung up in these areas, were supported by the projects.

With the exception of some fruits and vegetables, the products at irrigated western farms do not reach eastern markets. More than half of the area is used in the production of hay and forage which is consumed on the farms, and is an important factor in the support of the livestock industry of the Western States.