Word: silt
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Down with the Ditch. Franklin Roosevelt first tried to carve a canal across Florida's 172-mile neck in 1935, with $5,400,000 of relief money. By 1936 the money was gone, the canal was still a useless ten-mile ditch rapidly filling with sand and silt. In 1937 and again in 1939 the ditch came up for review-and more money-in Congress, and got the cold shoulder. At that time, one of the most vociferous opponents of the Great Boondoggle was New Hampshire's proud, loud Senator Styles Bridges...
Also in high water were the Ouachita, Arkansas, upper Susquehanna, Chenango Rivers. Mules and field hands hiked quickly for higher ground. The cottonwood trees felt silt on their upper branches. The waters came in and rose to angry lifts. Their major attack was on the U.S. war industries...
...Relativities. When Rommel made his first tentative attack, the rains in Ethiopia had washed the red-brown silt down from the hills, swelling the sluggish Nile. The hottest desert days were over...
...train scores of divers and hundreds of other salvage workers before the job can even be started. When salvage finally begins, the problem will include the construction of mammoth bulkheads inside the boat, to control the shift of the thousands of tons of water when she moves. The silt under her must be blown out and dredged out. A thousand holes in her steel skin, such as ports, must be sealed up. Out of her hull must be drained as many of the tons of dirty water as engineering judgment decides. And at least 10,000 cubic yards of muck...
True, Martaban had fallen and Japanese troops had made a second crossing of the treacherous Salween River. But Martaban, choked with decades of the Salween's silt, has little or no strategic value as a port for water-borne assault against Rangoon, across the Martaban Gulf. The Martaban-Rangoon railway is a flimsy affair. And troops crossing the Salween near Paan, 90 aerial miles from Rangoon, were met last week by deadly accurate British Blenheims, sowing thousands of pounds of delayed-action fragmentation bombs that cut the invaders to shreds...