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. t . . many people of the !'lSBOuri River Valley have largely forgotten the financial punishment you suffered in 1934, when droughts, combined with low prices for grain, caused greater losses in parched, destroyed and unmarketable crops, than have ever been caused by floods. Those who survived it could never l'orget it. Nor could the others who lost their possessions and moved away. You have got the choke of the dust-storm from your throats, but you are still p~ing ofr the $1,200,000,000 bill for relief which those droughts ran up for us and for our children. And for the untold loss of capital investment and productivity. Iii 1934, droughts cost the farmers hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion dollars in withered crops. Perhaps that drought cost you more than the whole Missouri Basin Project and all you got for your money was misery. The very next year, your Republican River carried 151,600 acre- feet of water and helped to pile up a weight of flood which' killed 110 people in the Republican Valley, 40 01' them in this area Illone., Five ;years later again, and the streambed was bare~' wet; it carried less than 13,000 acre-feet throughout the entire year 1940, less than a tenth the volume of 1935. Now we are in flood times again. Vihat will we have in five years? I don I t know. No one knows. But I do know that in the experience of the Bureau of Reclamation, we have often seen the needs of a region for its Reclamation structure completely reverse themselves before the structure was finished, and, having begun a dam for one purpose, we have had to rush it to completion to meet some different purpose it could also serve. It is one of the great and fundamental virtues of a multiple-purpose structure or a multiple-purpose team of structures that, when planned with foresight, it vall provide sufficient control and 8ufficinet conservation to protect ,2488 3