Uncontrolled flood of the Alamo Canal

Mexico / Baja California / Algodones /
This is the location where a channel was cut in the fall of 1904 from the Colorado River to the Alamo Canal, called the "Lower Mexican Intake". This channel was considered temporary, and had no heading or control gate. In the spring & summer of 1905, unusually heavy floods on the Colorado River enlarged the small channel, and enlarged the Alamo Canal itself, to such an extent that most, and at times the entire river flowed thru the canal into the Salton Basin. The flooding continued for the next yr and a half, forming the Salton Sea. Finally, in February of 1907, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had come to the rescue, managed to dam the Lower Mexican Intake, and turn the river back south to the Sea of Cortez.
Picture above is of the dry Colorado River bed below the Lower Mexican Intake, after the entire Colorado River had diverted into the Alamo Canal.

Picture looking south across the Lower Mexican Intake is here:
books.google.com/books?id=6FpDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontco...
at pg 26, with views north at pgs 40 & 42
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamo_Canal
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   32°40'15"N   114°45'36"W

Comments

  • Thank you for posting this. Fascinating. I have always wanted to visit the spot where this wage with the river was fought. Is the small sand bar in the old Colorado channel that you can still see at the southernmost tip of your map what is known as disaster island? I have read about the island in the river where one of the dams failed.
  • Wish I could take credit for the really xclnt map, but someone else put it up on Wikipedia. Yrs ago I visited the area to see if we could find where the breach occurred, but without the map we really couldn't tell. W/ the map, you can see precisely where things happened. I don't recall seeing the name of the island – might well have been called Disaster Island. On the map, you can see the outline of the island when it was much bigger than the small remnant labeled "Island". The map also shows two dams the canal owners tried to construct from the island to the western bank of the Colorado – neither dam worked, due to the exceptionally large summer floods of 1905. A desc of the island is in the linked Google book at pg 28.
  • I like the map. I was wondering where the cut in the river was made. Thanks for posting.
This article was last modified 10 years ago