OCR Text |
Show assistance. A similar amount should be supplied by the States. The Soil Conservation Service is providing tech- nical service to the 124 soil conservation districts in the basin organized under State law. Within the districts are some 40,000 ranches and farms and over 64 million acres of ranch and farm land. Conservation plans have been completed on 10,300 farms covering 4,870,000 acres, and treatment has been applied to some 2.5 million acres. The cost of assistance to these districts during fiscal 1950 was about $1,860,000. Through the agricultural conservation program of the Production and Marketing Administration of the Department of Agriculture, incentive pay- ments are made to farmers and ranchers to encour- age increased performance of needed soil and water conservation practices. The cost of the pro- gram in the Colorado River Basin is approximately 3.5 million dollars annually. Assistance payments totaling approximately 2.3 million dollars have been made to aid in the reor- ganization of the irrigation systems of individual farms and groups of farms. An educational program on watershed manage- ment as it relates to the use and conservation of range land, stock water development, reforestation, and runoff control is conducted cooperatively by the Extension Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Soil Conservation Service, and State agencies. There is an agricultural agent in each of the more important agricultural counties. Extension work, however, represents the minimum educational effort necessary to insure success of present plans for control and use of water resources. The Forest Service program of watershed re- search is now being carried out at six permanent locations in the basin, supplemented by numerous field studies at temporary locations. The principal objective is the discovery of methods for handling forest and range lands which will produce maxi- mum yields of usable water, minimum yields of sediment, and maximum returns from other resources. Hydroelectric Power Capacity, Yearly Production, Areas Served The Colorado River Basin has six Federal hydro- electric plants providing a total installed capacity of 1.2 million kilowatts. The largest of these plants are Hoover and Parker, which are located on the Colorado River and are under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Reclamation. Eleven existing non- Federal plants of 2,500 kilowatts or more installed capacity have a total installation of 110,200 kilo- watts. The two largest non-Federal plants are Horse Mesa and Roosevelt, which are located on the Salt River and operated by the Salt River Valley Water Users Association. The total in- stalled capacity of these existing plants (data for which are given in table 2) amounts to 1,301,200 kilowatts. In addition to the 17 existing plants included in the table, there are 29 small utility plants of less than 2,500 kilowatts capacity, having a total in- stalled capacity of 15,800 kilowatts, and three hy- droelectric power plants of industrial establish- ments having an installed capacity of 1,358 kilo- watts. The estimated annual generation of the small utility plants and industrial plants is about 83 million kilowatt-hours. The total active storage capacity provided in connection with the existing Federal plants amounts to 29,399,400 acre-feet, and that provided in con- nection with the non-Federal plants amounts to 1,770,460 acre-feet (table 2). The largest reser- voirs are Hoover on the Colorado River, Coolidge on the Gila River, and Roosevelt on the Salt River. The area selected by the Federal Power Commis- sion as a possible market for the output from com- pleted and potential hydroelectric projects of the basin contains approximately 344,000 square miles and includes southern California, the States of Ari- zona and Utah, western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming, and relatively small parts of Idaho, New Mexico, and Nevada. This area has an estimated population of 7.5 million persons, about 75 percent of whom reside in southern California. The economy of the survey area is based to a large extent on agriculture, mining, and manufac- turing. In recent years large-scale irrigation proj- ects have been developed utilizing water from mul- tiple-purpose projects on the Colorado River, re- sulting in a considerable increase in agricultural output. Stimulated by World War II demands and a rapidly growing economy in the postwar period, mining and industrial activities of the sur- vey area have also expanded greatly. Electric energy requirements of utility systems of the market area amounted to 17.8 billion kilowatt- hours in 1949, and estimates by the Federal Power Commission staff indicate this load will increase to about 42.9 billion kilowatt-hours in 1970, a growth of approximately 25.1 billion kilowatt-hours. The 369 |