by the State Board of Water Engineers, I worked with the board to incorporate legal measures to protect the interests of all parties who would benefit from the waters of the Rio Grande. Since it will be impossible for me to testify in person I would appreciate your inclusion of this statement in the record. I also have a brief telegram, Mr. Chairman, from former Vice President John Garner and other prominent citizens of Uvalde which is nearby. Incidentally, Mr. Garner has been talking to me for years about this project and I don't think it has a more enthusiastic supporter or booster in all of southwest Texas, and I ask that this be made a part of the record.

Mr. SELDEN. Without objection both telegrams will be made a part of the record at this point.

(The telegram is as follows:)

Hon. O. C. FISHER,

House of Representatives,

Washington, D.C.:

We, the undersigned citizens of Uvalde, Tex., heartily approve construction of Diablo Dam, and urge your support of the authorization bill (H.R. 8080).

MELVIN ROWLAND,

Mayor, Uvalde, Tex. JOHN N. GARNER,

Former Vice President of the United States.

HARRY HORNBY,

Publisher, Uvalde Leader News.

JACK WOODLEY,

Uvalde County Judge.

Ross DOUGHTY,

District Judge.

GRADY MAHAFFEY,

Vice Chairman, Edwards Underground Water District.

C. SUMNER HUNTER,

President, Uvalde Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. FISHER. I believe that is all, Mr. Chairman. Mr. SELDEN. Congressman Kilgore, we would like for you to introduce all representatives from your district who are at the hearing. Mr. KILGORE. Mr. Chairman, if it meets with the desire of the committee I would like to introduce those who will accompany the witness who is about to testify, and then with the next witness, introduce those from that area who will accompany.

Mr. SELDEN. That is perfectly agreeable.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOE M. KILGORE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS

Mr. KILGORE. The next witness is Mr. Jeremiah Rhodes of Eagle Pass, who will be presented in a minute.

Along with him from Eagle Pass, is a delegation of some 9 or 10 people.

County Judge R. E. Bibb, of Maverick County.

Mr. Earnest L. Smith, representing the Retail Merchants Association of Eagle Pass.

Mr. W. E. Pingenot, a county commissioner of Maverick County. Mr. Harold L. Hausman, who is chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Eagle Pass.

Mr. Gerald D. Becker, who is City Attorney.

Mr. R. E. Beard, who is here representing the city water board of the city of Eagle Pass.

Mr. Hollis Fitch, who is here representing the international bridge at Eagle Pass.

Mr. David Hume, who is a very prominent attorney and a member of the board of directors of the Texas Bar Association, here representing the city.

Their spokesman, Mr. Chairman, will be Mr. Jeremiah Rhodes, who will speak for several agencies and who specifically is the attorney for the Maverick County Irrigation District and is also designated as their spokesman by the city and by the county.

Mr. SELDEN. Congressman Kilgore, we are very pleased to have these representatives from Eagle Pass and we will be very happy to hear from you, Mr. Rhodes.

STATEMENT OF JEREMIAH INGELS RHODES, EAGLE PASS, TEX., ON BEHALF OF THE CITY OF EAGLE PASS, TEX., THE COUNTY OF MAVERICK, TEX., THE MAVERICK COUNTY WATER CONTROL AND IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT NO. 1, AND THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE CITY OF EAGLE PASS, TEX.

Mr. RHODES. By way of introduction, my name is Jeremiah I. Rhodes. I am attorney for the Water District and I am named in this as spokesman because I do not act as attorney for these other organi

zations.

I have named in the statement that has been handed to you there, the city of Eagle Pass, Tex., which includes, as well as the city itself, the city's international toll bridge, which is city owned, and the city waterworks, which is also city owned and which is represented here by some of these gentlemen that Congressman Kilgore has introduced.

Also, the county of Maverick, the Chamber of Commerce of Eagle Pass, and the Maverick County Water Control and Improvement District No. 1, which incidentally is the only organization diverting and furnishing irrigation waters to anyone in the county.

I gave a considerable amount of thought in coming up here as to just what contribution, if any, I could make to the hearing. Of course I wouldn't be here unless I was either for or against the legislation, and I would like to state here categorically that we are definitely for the legislation and the building of the dam. Of course that position, I suppose, could be equally well covered by a telegram.

I thought if there was any contribution I could make to the committee it would be to describe briefly the country that is involved here, the nature of the problems locally, which are certainly well set out in Colonel Hewitt's report, but from the angle of a professional engineer, rather than just some citizen who happens to be living down

there.

Looking at the map of Texas up there, if you start in the easterly portion of the State around Houston and Texarkana, the State has a rather high rainfall belt in that area.

Moving west, the rainfall drops off until you come to El Paso, Tex.,

which is virtually a desert area.

In the east Texas area, the trees are pine and hardwoods, some of them I suppose 40 or 50 feet in height. Coming over to San Antonio, the brush is perhaps 25 feet in height, mostly mesquite with belts of oak trees.

Going on west toward Eagle Pass, as you drive along you can see that the size of the brush is rapidly diminishing and when you come to our area, except for low spots where water accumulates, you have very small trees.

Going north of us, there is brush, but it continues to get smaller and that is because of the lack of rainfall and the diminution of rainfall as you go westward.

The country north of us which represents the area from Eagle Pass there, on up through Dei Rio and on up to Fort Quitman, is more or less a hilly, mountainous country, with deep channels in all the arroyos and creeks coming into the main river. The land is not covered solidly with any kind of vegetation at all and in many places you have rock outcrops and as a result any rainfall that falls in that area, if there is any substantial amount of it, has a tendency to run off rapidly into drainage channels and on into the river. Only a few of those streams run continuously. The Devils River runs continuously from the springs, and the Pecos River runs continually and the Rio Conchos in Mexico does, but most of our drainage ways in that country are dry except when rain falls that puts water in them and they run down river pretty fast.

I think Colonel Hewitt stated this morning that most of the floods occured above this proposed Amistad Dam site. It might be interesting to the committee for me to briefly explain why that is.

Starting at the Gulf of Mexico and going up the river of course there is a gradual rise in the land. When you get up to Laredo, a little north, the Balcones fault system starts. At that point it is not a single fault escarpment but a series of small faults running over a long area. The throw of that fault system is approximately 1,000 feet, if I recall correctly. That is to say the same strata on one side of the faults is about 1,000 feet higher than the other, and as a result, when warm masses of air from the gulf go over that country, they rise very rapidly in that area and frequently the precipitation point is reached up above Del Rio in the Devils River and Pecos River country. They have extremely high intensities of rainfall there sometimes. It is not at all uncommon to have 15 inches in a 24-hour period, and there have been times when it has exceeded 30 inches in a 24-hour period. Not over the whole area, but in concentrated portions of the storm that might be going on up there.

Usually those high flows come from the after effects or the end of tropical hurricanes originating in the Gulf of Mexico and going inland from Corpus Christi down to, say, Brownsville.

Maverick County extends about halfway-that is, Eagle Pass is approximately halfway in the center of Maverick County. We have, I would guess, about 100 river miles of area or boundary in our county. The county boundary is the same as that of the United States at that point and the city of Eagle Pass has as its boundary the county boundary and the international boundary as well.

Eagle Pass is the only incorporated town in the county. We have several farming villages out in the farming area.

The country around Eagle Pass has such a small rainfall, and the rainfall is so uncertain, that there is no dryland farming in our country at all. All farming is irrigated farming.

I have stated in the paper that I have left here with you that it would be impossible to raise a dryland crop-by that I meant it would be as a practical matter impossible for the simple reason that perhaps once in 5, or once in 10 years, if the farmer planted a crop he could carry it through without irrigation. But for all practical purposes we have no such thing as dryland farming in that area.

There is on the far eastern part of the county a small neck of the Carrizo sand formation which comes into the county from which irrigation wells pump water for irrigation on a very minor scale, to the far eastern portion of the county, but around Eagle Pass and in the western part of the county and all the main irrigated areas in the county there is no water whatever available for irrigation other than the Rio Grande water. There is also no other water available for domestic or municipal purposes.

The city of Eagle Pass depends entirely on flows from the Rio Grande. There are occasional farms, there is an occasional farm in the district where small wells are dug purely for domestic purposes and although I don't know it, I think that that water is largely seepage water from irrigation usages that is being pumped up again by those people.

However, most of our farms don't even have that. I live on a small farm that I own outside of town and we have to use water direct from the canal. There is no well water whatever in that particular part of the county.

The 1954 flood which was, I think, the worst one on the river, although there have been many of them, I remember very graphically when that happened. I was sitting up in the office and I had heard from our water district engineer that they were expecting a whole lot of water because, although we had had no substantial rainfall there, a large amount had fallen up above in the Pecos and Devils River. He said the Boundary Commission advised him they thought there was a good chance that the crest of the Devils and Pecos Rivers would hit at approximately the same time in the Rio Grande channel, and that if it happened we were going to be in for lots of trouble, and we were.

And gentlemen, many of you possibly and probably have been through floods of that type, but there is nothing more terrifying than to stand there on your main street and watch the water run backwards up hill toward you. It doesn't come awfully fast, but it keeps running backwards in the gutters first and then it fills the street, and then it gets over the sidewalk and then starts pouring down into the basements and running into the buildings, and it is a very terrifying experience, especially when you don't know how much more is coming, and how far it is going to go.

Well, practically all of our commercial areas in the town, the downtown business section, were inundated. Some of it didn't quite getnow at the place where my office is, it didn't quite get into the bottom floor. It came over the bottom steps but didn't quite get into the bottom floor of the building.

But from that point on toward the river it got deeper and deeper until where, on Commercial Street, which is the street that leads down to the International Bridge, it was up to the eaves of some of the houses along there, some of the buildings, or what would be the eaves if they didn't have a false front on them.

People did everything they could to get their merchandise and furniture and beds and everything else out of that area but of course when the water was coming up very rapidly, they had limited time within which they could work trucks down there. Every truck in the area was working madly trying to get stuff out but a great deal of property, that is merchandise and household furniture also, was left down there for the simple reason that the water got too deep for the trucks to operate.

Of course, sometimes you kind of laugh to see somebody paddling along down Main Street in a canoe and going in and out of some store building, but you joke about those things, but you are really not laughing. It is a very unnerving experience and when you consider that there is no reason why even greater floods can't be expected, you really want, I mean seriously want, some area of protection from that sort of damage.

After the flood went down, of course there was a thick layer of silt everywhere. Some of it was just an inch or two deep. In some places it was as much as a foot deep, depending on how the currents came in and where they stopped or were held back by a building or some other obstacle and dropped more silt someplace else.

I don't think there is anything that gets a worse odor than silt of that type after a flood is over with. Everything stays wet. I remember Valerio Santos, who is a groceryman down on Commercial Street, had a warehouse full of groceries, and he had a bunch of pinto beans in there and they were worse than the flood when they got to decaying in there. It didn't smell like a cider mill at all. They were fermenting but it had a different odor in it. I remember he threw out, I don't know, it must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of little pound boxes of salt out in the street. There was a big mound of them out there and they were throwing all that stuff out there that was completely unusable.

It took Eagle Pass about 10 days, not to clean up, but to get things shoved around enough to where they could do any kind of a commercial business.

At the same time, our bridge was washed out-not the whole bridge, but the approach, which is just about as effective; the railroad bridge was carried away. For quite a while we had no connection with Mexico at all except for air hops by small planes from one side of the river to the other.

The commercial life of Eagle Pass is very closely knit with that of Piedras Negras. The two towns have a common boundary and are separated only by the river. A great deal of the traffic across the bridge is foot traffic. People just walk across. It is a matter of maybe an ordinary city block and a half or two city blocks from one town to the other, just across the river.

There was not only the loss of merchandise but also the loss of business. Sales that never could be made the time had gone by.

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