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The Enterprise, White Salmon, WA., August 2, 1912, page 1

BIG POWER PROJECT
White Salmon Dam Only Part of Great Electric Power System

The dam and power plant of the Northwestern Electric company on the White Salmon river, 70 miles up the Columbia basin from Portland, in the Cascade mountains, will be the first unit in one of the largest electrical power projects that has been undertaken in the northwest, says a member of the Company.
This plant, which is to be completed and ready for immediate service by January 1, 1913, or within five months of the present time, will generate 20,000 electrical horsepower, but large as it is, it will be comparatively small beside two other plants to be begun soon after. The company has extensive water rights not only on the White Salmon river, but on the Klickitat and Lewis rivers, each the center of a great territory with wonderful development possibilities.
On the latter stream, which rises near Mt. St. Helens and is one of the principal tributaries of the lower Columbia, the largest of the power generating units will be built on the river in accordance with plans already drawn up, will develop between 40,000 and 50,000 horsepower.
The Klickitat plant, however, will be the first to rise after the completion of the White Salmon project. Its construction is to begin next year, and it will probably be completed early in 1914. It will develop about 30,000 horsepower. The Lewis river plant will follow at once.
The combined capacity of the three plants will be 100,000 horsepower.
The plans of the Northwestern Electric company, which has the financial backing of such houses as the Anglo & London-Paris National bank, the Crocker National bank, Antoine Borel & Co., and the Daniel Mayer bank, of San Francisco, call not only be active competition in the electrical field in Portland, but for extensive development of the smaller cities and towns, and their tributary country, in western Oregon and Washington.
The construction of electrical interurban lines into districts at present without adequate transportation or power facilities will be encouraged and cheap power will be supplied for a radius of many miles from the generating plants for manufacturing establishments.
With the completion of the four tunnels, ranging from 70 to more than 150 feet, in the sides of the canyon on the White Salmon project, in which the flow of the stream is to be confined for a distance of about 800 feet, the high concrete dam itself will rise rapidly from now on. This preliminary work has been very heavy, but it is now finished except for the last touches on the wooden flume that will carry the river through the tunnels and between them, in this unique "portage" of a whole mountain torrent. A wooden cofferdam, reinforced with a huge "crib" anchored down with rock, will divert the current into the flume at the upper end of this portage.
At the lower end, another temporary dam must be constructed to prevent the stream from "back flowing" into its old course after it has left the flume. The building of this dam, however, which will not have much pressure to withstand, will be a matter of only a few days. A huge scraper contrivance is now being run over the bed of the stream at this point to scoop up rocks and sediment as a foundation for this lower cofferdam.
The concrete dam itself, which will be 400 feet long, 125 feet high, 100 thick at the base and 15 at the top, will be built at the rate of 200 cubic yards of concrete a day. Among other special machinery needed in the construction of the big concrete structure, a huge concrete mixer is now on the way from an eastern manufacturer.
Another pace of special machinery on the way is a complete rock crusher which will grind basalt rock into 30,000 tons of fine stone and sand needed in the dam. The rock to be quarried for this purpose is in the face of a cliff 300 feet above the dam site, and will be carried down to the concrete mixers, assorted and made ready for use, by gravity. The special machinery used on the dam alone has cost between $75,000 and $100,000.
To bring the machinery from the railroad at Underwood, Wash., to the dam, a distance of about three miles, a special road is necessary, and between 25 and 30 teams are now improving the present road and grading a new one, where the old highway cannot be made safe.
Work is also progressing rapidly on the power house in connection with the dam, and about a mile below it. Two giant turbines, run by water pressure equal to 600,000 gallons in an hour, will furnish the motive power for the big dynamos that will generate 20,000 electrical horsepower.