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18 RELEASE OF COLORADO RIVER WATER As it turned out, it probably was the most valuable work that could have been done. It is extremely important. Secretary UDALL. The boondoggle was a boon. Senator ANDERSON. Very definitely. Senator MOSS. I wanted to ask two or three questions. This area of the river where you intent to flush out the silt, is that in the United States or is it in Mexico? Secretary UDALL. The United States. Mr. DOMINY. Well, it is in the United States primarily, although part of the silt problem below Morelos is in Mexico. The silt deposition is bad between Imperial and Laguna, and between Laguna and Morelos. The flushing operation has to release waters in quantities great enough to take the sediment clear to the gulf. Part of it is in Mexico, but the flushing is for our benefit, primarily. Senator Moss. You have no responsibility for channeling the river below the boundary line, do you? Mr. DOMINY. Except if we do not flush it clear out to the gulf, it just builds right back on us in any event. Senator ANDERSON. Once water is going down the river, it goes down the rest of the way, including the part below it. But you do it primarily for our sake. Mr. DOMINY. That is right. I also want to point out that in the manner in which we are operating, we are putting silt back into the river. So it is silt that we are deliberately returning to the river, in part, at least, rather than putting it into our canal systems in the United States. Senator Moss. Assuming you had the dredge there now and you could dredge the channel in the United States, would you propose to go over and dredge the channels in Mexico? Mr. DOMINY. No, at this point, they are going to have to do a similar dredging job, in part, on their own, too. Senator Moss. But at this point they are just going to rely on the United States to flush out their channel through Mexico? Mr. DOMINY. It is a complicated river operation problem. We take the silt out of the Colorado River water at the desilting works at Imperial and put it right back into the river. Then under normal operations, with just the normal releases to Mexico, with diversion at Morelos, all of this sediment is not moved out of the river. It moves gradually down and becomes a plug in that whole reach of the river. As I said, historically we have had enough water so that we flushed it out periodically and kept the river free. We know that this cannot continue since there are uses for the Colorado River waters in the upper and lower basins. We have had many discussions with Mexico and Mexico has had a tremendous silt problem of their own, in their own canal system. As a matter of fact, they have dredged silt out of their canal systems and piled it up so high that they can hardly find equipment that will lift it up high enough to store it. We understand that they are actually now buying up storage areas on which to put this silt. So it is a continuing problem that both governments are going to have to be wrestling with in that lower stretch of the river. Senator Moss. It would be better to spread it out and farm it.Epson Perfection 4870 Photo, 400 dpi, 24 bit, 1,439,728 byte