of the operation of that portion of the system which they are profiting by. They do pay a portion of the cost, but not a just portion of it.

Senator SHORTRIDGE. Well, how about the cost of maintaining levees from year to year?

Mr. ROSE. We pay all of that cost, very largely. The cost of maintaining the levees and the canals is very largely one cost, because there is no obligation by an agreement, even in Mexico, to maintain any levees. They are maintained by sufferance. It is a matter of self-protection. We are under no obligation to maintain one foot of levee so far as any agreement in Mexico is concerned.

Senator SHORTRIDGE. But you do do it? You do go over and spend money?

Mr. ROSE. That is correct, and they get the first benefit.

The CHAIRMAN. The parties about whom you speak of using the waters in Mexico, are they mainly Mexican citizens or other nationals?

Mr. ROSE. They are American citizens who are commercializing their citizenship. They are American capitalists who are perfectly willing to deplete the water supply in the United States in order that they may enjoy the benefit of it on a cheap land in a foreign country, worth about $1 an acre in its natural state.

Senator SHORTRIDGE. Would your views undergo any change if we acquired Lower California?

Mr. ROSE. Well, I should say that 30 or 40 years ago it would have been a splendid thing to acquire Lower California, but if we did it now we would be playing into the hands of half a dozen men.

Senator SHORTRIDGE. I mean the whole of Lower California.

Mr. ROSE. Well, of course, that would not interest us very much except as to the portion immediately south of us. One man is building a railroad down there to transport his products out of that country and it is largely a one-man country. He is the one man that never exercised any real amount of fairness in dealing with the farmers on the United States side.

Senator JONES of Washington. Bearing on the question of Senator Kendrick, I want to ask you where the drainage is from the Imperial Valley.

Mr. Rose. Into the Salton Sea.

Senator JONES of Washington. That does not come back to be available for irrigation purposes?

Mr. ROSE. If it did come back it would go into Mexico.

Senator JONES of Washington. It does not come back into Mexico? Mr. ROSE. No.

Senator JONES of Washington. So that there is no benefit coming from drainage water?

Mr. ROSE. That is true. It is in the watershed, of course.

Senator JONES of Washington. Is there very much irrigation out of the Colorado River above the Laguna Dam?

Mr. ROSE. There is some. There is the Great Salt River Basin in Utah, and there is the Maford Tunnel which takes the water out of the river shed on the eastern slope. Those two will divert water out of the drainage basin, but I understand that where water is diverted,

in the basin, Senator, that the highest estimate we had is a return of something like 33 or 34 per cent.

In

Senator KENDRICK. That would depend upon the location. your lower country and warmer climate, there would be less return than there would be on the higher level.

Mr. ROSE. That is true.

Senator KENDRICK. The reason you have a perpetual flow in the streams is because the snow on the mountains is in the form of irrigation itself. It gradually spreads out on the mountain side and they all get in the streams at one time.

Mr. ROSE. That is true.

Senator JONES of Washington. I want to ask one other question, and that is this: What security will be given for the repayment for the cost of building that all-American canal in view of the fact that you have $12,000,000 or $16,000,000 of bonded indebtedness on the Imperial Valley lands now?

Mr. ROSE. The real security will be a contract to repay our portion of it on the properties that are worth $100,000,000 and produce annually a great deal more than the total cost of the canal.

Senator JONES of Washington. But the Government would not have a first lien, would it?

Mr. ROSE. No; yet under the bonding law of an irrigation district in California you would have just as good a lien as an actual lien to anybody else. Bonds have no priority when issued against any subdivision of the State of California.

Senator JONES of Washington. You have bonds on the district now of $12,000,000 or $16,000,000.

Mr. Rose. About $16,000,000.

Senator JONES of Washington. We would have no superior claim for the bonds issued for the construction of this all-American canal? Mr. ROSE. No, sir. We have never yet defaulted on a five-cent piece in the Imperial district on a bond or anything else.

Senator JONES of Washington. But what I was getting at is that the Government is very insistent on having first liens on what is coming to it.

Mr. ROSE. They would have an equal lien with anyone else on the portion that was charged to the Imperial irrigation district, which has property worth $100,000,000 and which produces considerably more annually than the total cost of the canal, in addition to 500,000 acres more land just as fertile as that.

Senator JOHNSON of California. The assurance of the canal would add immensely to the value of the lands, would it not?

Mr. ROSE. It undoubtedly would. The lands across the river are worth double what the lands in the irrigation district are worth, and they can also get Federal loans at a low rate of interest which, of course, we are deprived of.

Senator JOHNSON of California. The Mexican concession has been spoken of under which you operate south of the line. Do you recall whether that concession provides what would happen in case you should appeal to the United States Government in any matter concerning the canal?

Mr. ROSE. The concession is filed in the record of the old hearings. It provides for a forfeiture.

Senator JOHNSON of California. The concession is on file?

Mr. Rose. It is in the old House hearings. You can see the exact terms of it.

Senator JOHNSON of California. Just in a sentence, tell me what are the products of the Imperial Valley at the present time.

Mr. ROSE. They consisted last year of about 10,000 carloads of lettuce, about 14,000 carloads of canteloupes, several thousand carloads of melons, a large acreage of cotton, barley, corn, large amounts of butter, poultry and eggs, and the general western products of hogs-pretty largely everything that is raised on a farm.

I wanted to say one thing about the concession. There is not anything in the concession compelling us to pack a drop of water through Mexico. It provides that they are entitled to take one-half of what we take through. It is not a violation for us to do something else, because we have not obligated ourselves to furnish water. Senator KENDRICK. Is that allotment of one-half based on the proportion of acreage of lands irrigated in the Imperial Valley, or is it just an arbitrary half?

Mr. Rose. It is just one-half of the water. During this summer's shortage they took one-half of the water.

Senator KENDRICK. Without regard to the needs or merits of the situation?

Mr. Rose. Without regard to the needs. They suffered very little loss and we suffered a great deal. The water shortage this summer probably cost the valley $5,000,000 or $6,000,000. For 76 days we took all the water. Part of the time we had very little more than stock water. If the communities above us had been able to divert what water they wanted at that particular time out of the river there would have been scarcely stock water this year. In other words, the Colorado River has been at least so that if the same amount of land that is under cultivation this year had been under cultivation at least five or six times in the last 20 years that condition would have prevailed to a large extent. There is the trouble to-day, an overirrigation of half a million acres of land, so that nobody can go any further anywhere without depriving somebody else of the right to use water on the river which is now using it. Senator KENDRICK. I do not believe anyone here has said anything about that all-American canal. I want to ask, at the expense of a little time, whether there are any engineering complications to be encountered in the construction of the canal.

Mr. ROSE. The canal has been reported on by some ten or a dozen very able engineers all of whom have found no particular engineering difficulty and have recommended the construction of it.

It passes through a group of sand hills. That is the only difficulty there.

Senator KENDRICK. It may require dredging at times?

Mr. ROSE. It may. Those sand hills, however, are of quite a heavy texture, and move very little. You will find on the sand hills bunches of grass growing on the leeward side. The wind comes from a northwesterly direction. On the southeasterly slopes you will find groups of greasewood and grass where you can pick up an armful of dead grass, showing that there is no great amount of interference.

The State maintains a highway about twice as wide as this table. An average of 150 cars pass over that road every day.

Senator KENDRICK. Do you ever oil that road?

Mr. ROSE. No; that is a plank road. You realize that four or five yards of sand on a road would block it or a railroad train; but twenty times that amount in a canal would be absolutely unnoticeable.

Senator KENDRICK. The Senator from Arizona does not happen to be here. In his State I have had trains of cattle half loaded and would have to unload them because the railroad people said the sand was moving, and, when it was, they could not take them out of the station.

Mr. ROSE. What would stop a train would not affect a canal carrying that much water. But in addition to that I took Mr. Walters, who is now the construction engineer of the Reclamation Service, over this route, and he told me that they had worse canals passing through considerably worse sand only carrying 100 feet of water, I think, in Kansas or Nebraska. We have worse drifts in the valley in the finer sand.

Senator KENDRICK. I wondered that you did not have some trouble of that kind on the present canal.

Mr. ROSE. We do, not through Mexico, but in our present system in the valley we have canals passing through worse moving sand than that of the all-American canal.

Senator KENDRICK. What is the width of the canal and the depth of it?

Mr. ROSE. I think the width of it is estimated to be 120 feet at the bottom with a 2 to 1 float. Passing through the sand hills there is a distance of about half a mile in length where there would be a cut of 150 feet. The rest of it averages between 50 and 60 feet in depth through a stretch of about 12 miles.

Senator KENDRICK. What depth of water do you propose to carry? Mr. ROSE. Fourteen feet, I think.

Senator JOHNSON of California. May I say to you, Senator, that there is here a report on file of the all-American canal board by Engineers Gunsky, Sclecht, and Mead, that approves the canal and shows its feasibility, etc.

The CHAIRMAN. Is this an open canal?

Mr. ROSE. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Will it have sides and bottom of concrete?

Mr. ROSE. There are two plans. There is a plan figured for concreting it above the water's edge and there is that plan of an open canal.

The CHAIRMAN. Is there any part of it where you use tubes?

Mr. ROSE. No; it is an open canal all the way. There is a small tunnel at Pilot Knob.

Senator KENDRICK. There are no flumes?

Mr. ROSE. There is either a flume or a syphon across New River. It was built when the river broke in. There is nothing on the main canal.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Rose, if that concludes your statement. It has been very interesting.

Senator JOHNSON of California. Mr. Chairman, I shall conclude in a very few minutes. With the committee's permission, I want to recall Mr. Davis. I know Mr. Davis is familiar with the situation. I have not personally talked with him about it of late, but I would like him to explain something concerning the all-American Canal so you may understand fully respecting that.

STATEMENT OF MR. ARTHUR P. DAVIS, CHIEF ENGINEER AND GENERAL MANAGER EAST BAY MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT, OAKLAND, CALIF.-Resumed

Mr. DAVIS. The all-American canal was correctly described, so far as he went, by Mr. Rose. It was investigated by It was investigated by a cooperative survey of the United States and the Imperial irrigation district, and those surveys were review by a board appointed, one member by the Reclamation Service, one by the Imperial irrigation district, and one by the University of California.

Mr. Elwood Mead was the representative of the university, a sort of umpire, but the board was unanimous in all of its reports. It reported the estimated cost of the main canal as about $30,000,000, as has been stated. They refer to it frequently regarding the plans for the irrigation of the Imperial Valley, and this document that you have just decided to include in the hearings contains their conclusions. The superfluous matter, large tables, etc., can be omitted and the report considerably abbreviated.

One of the objections made to the all-American canal by those who have objected to it-and there are those-is the moving, drifting sand which will have a tendency so far as it drifts in to clog the canal. But this will be a canal under high velocity. It would not pay to build such a deep cut as this is, ranging in the maximum from 150 feet to nothing where it merges at the end. About 6 miles of it is 100 feet or more through the sand hills and the rest of it shallower, the average being something like 50 or 60 feet. For a short distance it runs through hills of sand with various sparce vegetation upon them, the sparceness of the vegetation being due more to the extreme aridity of the climate than to the moving sand, for the part away from the sand hills which is not moving is also equally destitute of vegetation.

The problem of controlling that sand or taking care of it if it should blow into the canal would be not more difficult here, I think less difficult, than that of the North Platte Canal which the Reclamation Service has for many years maintained in the State of Nebraska, where similar conditions of sand occur in a very much smaller stream with a low velocity. With a stream of high velocity, above 4 second-feet or above 3 second-feet, I will venture to say, no sand would deposit. The sand would be carried on through.

The CHAIRMAN. What is the fall in the canal from the point of diversion to the Imperial Valley?

Mr. DAVIS. I am not quite able to answer that question from memory.

The

Mr. ROSE. I can answer it if you will permit me to do so. crest of the Laguna Dam is 150 feet above sea level, the starting point of the canal. It ends at the west side in the Imperial Valley at an elevation of 10.6 feet below sea level.