Los Angeles herald., 1910-05-02
IS D K
SAYS BETkOUSkI
JunketerS, Back from Close In
Spection of Work on Big
Ditch, Satisfied
Continued from Page onel

gineers, $4,000 under the lowest bids
received frofn contractors. Eighty hTc
per cent of the tunnels in the Jawbone
division are completed and lined and
the great steel siphon, crossing a can
yon 500 feet deep, is we'll under way
Friday night was spent at Cinco, the
headquarters of the JaWbone division,
where the party found hundreds of
carloads of construction material piled
high on the sand. Small mountains of
woven-wire reinforcing for the COM
duit cover the rabbit fence" of
would-be critics, piles of cement and
other supplies. dwarfed the big shops,
cook and bunk-house into insignifi-
canoe.
Saturday morning they crossed the
north end of the Mojave division. thir-
ty-five miles of desert, across twenty
of which the conduit is completed and
covered, and arrived at Tehachapi
pass, where they found the city's ce-
ment mill running at full capacity.
THE municipal cement plant has
been worth more to the city than will
ever be computed" said Mr.. Betkouski.
mot only is the cement manufactured
of a high grade, but the plant has been
of inestimable value in forcing a rea-
sonable price from outside cement
dealers who bid on the surplus which
the city has had to purchase. All told.
I walked through about five miles of
the completed conduit with a flash
light and hammer i'll hand, inspecting
the finished walls. and found them
sound and we'll built in every in
stance"
Sunday morning the party Travelled
through Antelope valley and the Fair
mont hills, where P. A. Howard is
constructing eleven miles of conduit,
the only contract let on the entire 2o0
miles of the aqueduct. This work is
being done under the supervision of
the aqueduct engineers, however, and
is necessarily being done in a first
class manner, although the contractor
is not pushing the work, and it shows
a smaller per cent completed than any
other division on the line.
The autos were driven through three
miles of completed and lined tunnels in
the San Francisquito division and find
ing that the rails had been Joined in
the recently pierced Newhal tunnel
the party mounted the mine cars and
were drawn by an electric locomotive
through to the foot of the Newhall
grade, where they took the train and
returned to Los Angeles.
PRAISE MULHOLLAND AND LIPPINCOTT
'Too much credit cannot be given to
engineers in direct charge of the work,
and to the engineers who have given
their advice from time to time on the
more difficult problems" said Council
man Betkouski. In spite of the fact
that forty-fve miles of tunnel are un-
der construction, where the original
plans only contemplated about twenty,
it is my opinion that the aqueduct will
be finished for $2,O00,00O less than the
original estimates.
Magnificent discipline and organi-
zation prevail along the entire line,
and every known labor-saVing device
and short cut to results seems to have
been taken advantage of.
1--WE found several well-grounded
complaints regarding the food served
the laborers, which the commissary
concessionaire will probably hear of,
but the laborers are of a rowing class,
and even at the cement mill, the only
place where the city maintains the
cookhouse, the superintendent in
formed me that the average stay of
laborers was only fifteen days. Meals
here are served for 25 cents, which cost
"a to prepare, and I found them to be
absolutely first class. s- e r..
"Sites for power plants in the San
Francisquito seem to be without num-
ber, each with an available head of
oyer a thousand feet, and the possi-
bilities of power development are enor-
nous.