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, I Omaha, August 15, 1938 The recent Kearney Canal Case covered nearly all of the physical fea- tures of the Platte River System including the North and South Platte rivers. The Platte is the largest tributary of the Missouri river with a drainage area of 90,000 square miles in Colorado, Wyoming and NebraSka. The Kearney Canal bas First Priority. Its headgate is located at the lower end of the Nebraaka irrigation area. North Platte is 63 miles upstream and the Western Boundary of Nebraska is some 275 miles from Kearney. Hence. these natural geographical difficulties are keenly felt at Kearney whenever there is a shortage of water supply. Some of the outstanding facts in this case are graphically portrayed by the attached Skew profile from Saratoga, Wyoming to Plattsmouth, NebraSka, a distance of 900 miles, with a slope or fall of about 6000 feet. In Nebras- ka, the slope. is about ~ feet per mile as far east as the mouth of the Loup River at Columbus. This high grade gives the Platte river an excess of energy for discharge of large volumes of water, resulting in a combination of high velocities and destructive scour, erosion and transportation of sediment, for rising and high stages. (The Missouri river below Ft. Peck, Montana, has a fall of less than one foot per mile.) This accounts for a very wide flood channel for the Platte River, in a state of nature, before excessive diversions were made. The profile on the back of this outline also shows extensive irriga- tion reservoirs and diversion works at Seminoe, Pathfinder, Alcova, Guernsey and Whalen, Wyoming. It shows location of the Kingsley, Tri-County Reservoir above the Keystone diversion of the Sutherland, Platte Valley, project. All six of these prime factors have and will change the behavior of the Platte river and will affect the flowage of waters for all purposes. Nature has and will continue to respond by shrinking the wide channel and making adjustments to meet these changes. The Platte is not the same old river. How could it be? without head water, June floods from mountain snow stDrage, with diversions and depletions made to reclaim ever increasing thous- ands of upstream acres of reclamation areas; is it any wonder that the Kearney Canal and lOwer river projects go short of water when the hot summer seasons find the water supply over appropriated? So it now appears, when ground waters !'ire consumed by evaporation and transpiration; when the wide bed of the river is parched and rainfall is laCk- ing; after the upstream Junior Appropriators have been well cared for; that now we are told, by our own State Irrigation Department, thru its chief engineer, that this situation is impossible and he finds no way to deliver water to the Kearney Canal. The evidence 1n this case indicates that administration of irrigation waters is beset with insistant demands from all quarters. That since 1931 a system of water disposal analysis has been developed to adjust the dynamic changes of increments and decrements occurring throughout a distance of 275 miles from the State Line to Kearney. ~9tt - 1 -