The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-09-07
BLOWING UP ARCH BLOCK.
The Sight Seems to Have Been Worth Seeing.

Arch Rock is gone. Over where i
 once arose menace to navigation
 mariners may soon, it is believed, steer
 their craft in perfect confidence. A
 few minutes past noon yesterday Miss
 Lucia Axman, daughter of the con
 tractor who has had the worry in hand
 pressed the button which unloosene6
 all the explosives force of thirty tons
 of nitro- gleatin, well placed in hun
 dred of holes under the great~crag And then the watching hundreds on the
 boats and the thousands on the hills
 were transixed in attention.
 They saw mountain of tumbling
 waters, dotted here and there with
 debris, rising majestically hundreds of feet in the air where an instant before
 had been a long flat platform shining
 in the midst of the sunlit, peaceful
 strait The waters had hardly subsid-
 ed when scores of craft of every de-
 ly taken in as souvenirs, while gerly taken in as souvenirs, while
 boatmen did a lively business picking up dead fish. For acres and acres the waters were white with foam and streNfn with debris. Presently the con- | tractors boat came up and began mak- | ing sCundings. Whether the desired depth has been made at all points can not be ascertained now, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that after dredging out the loose rock the chan nel will not be cleared The engineers in charge are confident that the result is altogether successful
 It was ascertained by Colonel Heur, by means of photographs and triangu lation, that the maximum height reached by the water was 466 feet In the first Shag Rock explosion the col umn ascended 9s1 feet; in the second 1,106 feet. Ip the amount of explosive used the present operations were ex- ceeded only by the blowing tip of Hell Gate in New York harbor In 1876. On that occasion black powder was used.
 The charging of a mine of such mag nitude in the immediate vicinity of a city was then altogether unprecedent- ed and dire results were predicted.
 To those who saw the splendid col umn of water which sprang skyward a full thousand feet when the Shag Rock mines were shot the spectacle yesterday was something of a disap- pointment. Under Shag Rock there had been but eight tons of nitro-glyce- rin. Under Arch Rock more than thirty tons had been placed in the diff ferent drillings and a somewhat pro- portionate result was anticipated
 It was difficult for the spectators to estimate the height to which the tre- mendous body of displaced water was thrown. At first it seemed as though The Shag Rock exhibition was to be al- together dwarfed by the immense col umn of water which suddenly scared gracefully toward the zenith. But, tre- mendous In volume though it was, the great white flood did not reach the ex- pected height.
 Viewed from the south the ascend ing water seemed to rise first from the western end of the long working plat form. Spreading eastward as it rose, carrying hundreds of piles with it and a great burden of indiscriminate tim Der, it soon reached length almost twice that of its height. Then some idea could be gained of the thousands on thousands of cubic yards of water that had been lifted into .midair. The deep reverberation came across the water to ones ear only after the noun tain of water ha dalmost subsided Its deep rumble gave a new impression of the depth, of the disturbance. The tons of rock which were lifted far out of the water could not be so well seen as the fragments of the demolished coffer.--San Francisco Chronicle