Items of Interest March 28, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

The site of the Pacific terminal of the Panama canal at Balboa, including the dry docks, shop facilities, wharves, and the one new commercial pier authorized at present, begins with the sea end and extends about one mile in a southwest to northeast direction. Its normal width is about nine hundred feet, and it will have an area of approximately one hundred and three acres. The accommodations for shipping at the terminals include a reenforced concrete pier, 1000 feet long by 300 feet wide, for handling cargo; a repair wharf, having an aggregate length of 2,960 feet, with average width of 50 feet; two dry docks, the larger 1000 feet long, 110 feet wide, and with a depth of 35 feet over the keel blocks at mean tide, the smaller 350 feet long, 71 feet wide, and with a depth of 13½ feet over the keel blocks at mean tide; and a coaling plant with facilities for handling and storing two hundred and ten thousand tons of coal.

British capitalists have just acquired fourteen thousand acres of land adjoining the town of Kinsella, Alberta, seventy-five miles east of Edmonton, where a model rural community and demonstration farm is to be established. The novelty of the plan lies in the fact that the principals, all men of affairs in England, will endeavor to attract particularly those who have had no previous experience in farming. This may well be called a "forward to the land" movement. The model farm of three hundred and twenty acres will be operated along strictly business lines, and at the same time the settlers in the district will have the advantage of its educational features.

With the filing of rights on the unappropriated flow of the Verde river by the Water Users' Association of the Salt River Valley, Arizona, the first step has been taken in a project which will add thirty-six thousand six hundred acres of irrigated land to the Salt river reclamation project. It is proposed to construct a large reservoir at Horseshoe Bend on the Verde river at an estimated cost of one million dollars. The Roosevelt reservoir and the normal flow of the Salt and Verde rivers will irrigate about one hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. The installation of twenty-one pumps and the construction of the Horseshoe dam will raise the total irrigable land to two hundred and eleven thousand six hundred acres.

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