Letters: Article on tower contained errors

‘Landmarks’ story inaccurate

I read with interest your article in the March 13 Spokesman Review on the “surge tower” in the Valley. Unfortunately, nearly everything you said in that article was wrong, starting with the designation of that structure as a “surge tower.” It was not. I grew up within 200 yards of that tower, playing under, on and in the irrigation system of which it was a part.

That tower was part of the Corbin Irrigation System, which provided irrigation water from east of Greenacres at least as far west as the vicinity of Pines and Mission in Opportunity. There was a second tower, a mirror image of the remaining one, about ¼-mile east at the intersection of Broadway Avenue and Flora Road. I say mirror image because what you call a “spout” was on the east side of this second tower, rather than on the west.

Water flowed from the east through Greenacres in an overhead wooden flume. When it reached the tower on Flora Road, it flowed down into that tower through an underground concrete pipe, up through the tower in your photo and into another overhead flume, which was connected at your “spout.”

This flume was built on a scaffoldlike structure and was about 4- to 4-1/2 feet wide and about 4 feet deep, lined with sheet metal. It was 12- to 14 feet above the ground at the point where it connected to the “spout.”This flume sloped gradually down until reaching a point at the east end of the Mirabeau Park Hotel parking lot, where it ran into a concrete-lined ground-level irrigation ditch about 5 feet wide and 4 feet deep.

That ditch ran west at least to Pines and Mission. Generations of Valley kids spent their summers swimming in “The Ditch,” often joined by their parents in the evening. Some of us would climb up the scaffold and into the flume right at your “surge tower” and swim down the length of the flume to Sullivan Road.

There were real “surge towers” all around the Valley as part of an underground irrigation system, but they were nothing like that tower. The typical irrigation tower was a concrete standpipe from 18 inches to 3 feet in diameter and from 6- to 10-feet high. They served the dual purpose of releasing pressure and providing access to diversion gates used to shunt water from one section of the system to another.

I suppose that none of this is important now, except that material appearing in newspapers tends to become fact to future historians, whether it is or not. If your article accurately reflects the contents of an archaeological and historical report authored at EWU, it is even more unfortunate for someone studying the history of our region 50 or 100 years in the future.

Paul Gillespie

Spokane Valley