Ditch of Destiny: The Bessemer Helped Pueblo Develop, Grow

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The Pueblo Chieftain Online Page 4 of 5 supplying farms in the system. Since 1964, the Bessemer has been a principal source of water for the St. Charles Mesa Water District, formed in that year to replace cisterns that many area residents used for drinking water in their homes. Now the district serves 11,000 people, many in subdivisions that have grown on the Mesa. David Simpson, manager of the water district, said Bessemer Ditch water amounts to about 50 percent of the district's supply to customers, and it also supplies four farms that the district owns. "We're keeping them in ag as long as we can, but if we ever had to pull that water into the system our water would probably be about 70 percent from the Bessemer," Simpson said. The building of the Fryingpan- Arkansas Project and Pueblo Dam in the 1970s brought a new era - and it brought both good news and bad news for the Bessemer. The headgate that had served for almost a century was inundated by Lake Pueblo, so a new headgate was built in the dam itself. Both shareholders and the city neighbors of the ditch soon noticed a serious seepage problem. It turned out that the new headgate wasn't letting the river's natural silt into the ditch along with the water. Without the silt to line the ditch, it flooded basements in town and lost as much as 40 percent of its water before it got to the shareholders on the Mesa. Bert Hartman In 1980 the federal government appropriated $1.5 million to line about 8,000 feet of the ditch with Gunite, a concrete product, and eventually the whole channel through town was lined. The other by- product of the Fry -Ark Project was good news for the shareholders. Lake Pueblo provided room for Bessemer and other Arkansas Valley farm ditches http : / /www.chieftain.com/print.php ?article= /metro /1123480800/4 8/9/2005