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<br />I <br /> <br />Valley. Your major streams, the Fountain comes <br />in below, Timpas Creek comes in below, Apishapa, <br />Chico, and all the side streams, are very wild <br />streams. I think we should immediately get <br />some studies going on some dams on many of <br />these larger side streams because they drain <br />terrifically large areas. If a fellow hasn't <br />seen what happened down in that country, you <br />just don't know. There are tractors with just <br />the exhaust pipe sticking out of them, there <br />are pickup trucks that it came almost to the <br />top of them. Just like Mr. Sparks said, it <br />ran water through houses five and six feet <br />deep. The people thre\'l everything out on the <br />street. There are five and six foot deep sand <br />banks on what was productive farm lands and <br />many, many of the major irrigation companies <br />below John Martin are practically flattened out <br />as well as those above John Martin. <br /> <br />In our own particular case, in 1955 we <br />had a flood that cost us $413,000 to put in <br />.a new dam and to take care of the flood damage. <br />This one that came dO\'ffi through the other day, <br />to protect the canal from the river taking it, <br />I think that we need immediate channelization. <br />The river jumps up in many, many places. There <br />are lots of places where you could make some <br />cuts in the river to channel it and take much <br />of the burden off the ditch companies for pro- <br />tection. They have gone down in the bottom of <br />the river; they have leveled off the trees, <br />(they leveled off forty to eighty acres where <br />they cut all the trees down), then the next <br />year they come in and level the land and put a <br />well down in the bottom and it automatically <br />becomes valuable farmland. It's river bottom <br />land and they all know it and much of it was <br />covered. <br /> <br />I <br /> <br />No ditch company is large enough to start <br />going down there and try to do any channeliza- <br />tion on the river because it would have more <br />lawsuits than you can shake a stick at. The <br />phreatophytes are really booming and doing <br />good. There is going to have to be some way <br />