Water-Works Reports.

Water-Works Reports.

MANHATTAN, Kan.—The report of Superintendent George E. Hopper for the year ending December 31, 1890, shows the receipts of the works to have been $2,860.17, and operating expenses $2,434.91. The net cost of the system to date had been $70,620.03. The system includes 40,770 feet of mains and 49 double hydrants. The report gives an interesting account of the improvements made to the works last year, including the laying from the pump house to the river of a ten-inch suction pipe, with a gang of twelve four-inch filter tubes at the river end. These tubes, which were bought of the Cook Well Company, are six feet in length, and were located in the bed of the Blue river, about 500 feet from the pumping station, at a depth of twenty feet below low-water level, and distributed over an area 40 x 120 feet. The river bed here consists of eight feet of coarse sand, below which is a bed of hard clay about a foot thick. The water is drawn from an eight-foot layer of clean sand and gravel below this clay layer. The supply is apparently unlimited, and the quality practically filtered Blue river water. Th flow of the wells is collected to the suction pipe by four-inch to eightinch wrought-iron pipe.

供应水的九十磅的压力per square inch was used in sinking the wells, with most satisfactory results. Ten minutes was time enough in which to sink the four inch pipe twenty feet, leaving the inside clear for the introduction of the filter tube. Sheet piling was used to keep sand out of the trenches for laying the connecting pipe ; but the weather being warm and the river very low, no effort was made to keep water pumped down. The ten-inch cast-iron suction pipe was laid in three sections, the longest of 180 feet. The former conduit from the river to the pump-well is an eighteen-inch tile, laid in quicksand, at a depth of four to six feet below low-water level. This tile having been laid without support other than the bed of quicksand, and the joints not being cemented, had settled in places unequally, leaving openings through which the pipe had filled over half full of sand and mud. An opening sixteen teet long was made in this tile near the middle. The ten-inch pipe was shoved either way from there through the tile. Each joint was calked as laid with lead cast into bars. The pipe was laid with the ends open, and a stream of water was kept running through, which partly removed the sand and mud from the tile. The third section was laid from the open river end of the tile to the manhole on the river bank. The largest clear opening found, through which sand could work into the tile, measured inches wide at the widest part. It was on account of openings of this sort, supposed to exist, that the laying of the cast pipe was undertaken. This pipe now connects the wells directly with the pumps.