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. )~ . . . Bureau of Reclamation Region 7 052652-P 43 Bldg. 46, Denver Federal Cent.er Denver, Colorado For Release 6130 p.m., Saturday, May 31, 1952 Remarks of COllllllissioner of Reclamation Michael W. Straus at the Bonny Dam Dedication Banquet, Burlington, Colorado, Saturd~, May 31, 1952. For release upon delivery. We join you here about two years ahead of time to sign up the newest member of the Missouri River Basin Project. to a place on the varsity team. Thanks to a record-breaking construction job on the part of all concerned in this partnership, including yourselves, Reclamation and the Utah Construction Company, Bonny Dam takes an honorably early place in the slowly groWing but still all too thin. line of bulwarks which eventually Will protect the Nation's breadbasket from the twin menaces of ravaging waters or scorching droughts. Nine Reclamation dams now stand completed of a total of more than 100 planned in the Missouri watershed. Some more are under construc- tion. These completed dams have done heroic work in holding back flood waters; but naturally, nine prove inadequate to do the work of 100. They have indicated what can be done, just as the !loods on the Kaw and Missouri proved the overwhelming need for fast and energetic work. A couple of months ago, Shadehill Dam in South Dakota held back 311,000 acre-feet of water--enough to have covered 10 square miles SO feet deep had it gone unchecked to add its weight to the floods on the Missouri. Heart Butte, Dickinson, Cedar Bluff, and others also stood firm in the path of the floods. Viithout such dams, the cities which averted repeated disaster by the narrowest of margins might well have succumbed, and the <19~age done would unquestionably have been worse.