Facebook ditch the dredge9/23/2023 We talk about “green” technology now, but in 1925 the proposed aqueduct was as green as you could get. James Davidson, the mining engineer responsible for the 50-mile long Miocene Ditch on the Seward Peninsula, designed the Davidson Ditch. to move into the Fairbanks area (opening of the Alaska Railroad and development of the Healy coal fields) also allowed mining engineers to develop large-scale waterworks necessary to make dredging profitable. 8 used 9,000 gallons per minute, and five of the FE Co.’s dredges were supplied via the Davidson Ditch.įortunately, the same factors that allowed the FE Co. Large-scale placer mining operations weren’t considered feasible in Fairbanks before the 1920s because of the huge volumes of water needed and inadequacy of local streams. But whoever coined the name for the system evidently liked alliteration and Davidson Ditch had more panache than Davidson Aqueduct. The open canal section (83.5 miles total), with a width of 12-feet and depth of almost four-feet, was as large as some of the early tow-boat canals on the East Coast. “ Ditch” is such a mundane word and certainly doesn’t accurately describe the Davidson Ditch, the 90-mile long system of open earthwork canals, steel pipe and tunnel that carried water from the upper reaches of the Chatanika River to the Fairbanks Exploration Company’s gold dredges near Fairbanks.
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