Yuma Arizona Siphon
YUMA, ARIZONA -- Who gives a big birthday present to a big hole in the ground?
Well, when the hole in the ground is a key part of Yuma’s $3.2 billion agriculture industry and it’s about to celebrate its 100th birthday, this Colorado River town in the southwest corner of Arizona does.
The hole is the Yuma Siphon, a massive tunnel under the Colorado River that’s been delivering irrigation water to the Yuma Valley since June 29, 1912. And the birthday present is a spiffy new exhibit all about the Siphon’s history that the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area is due to unveil in February, just in time for Arizona’s official Centennial.
“ Of course, statehood was important here, as it was across Arizona. But controlling the river and tapping its water was what allowed Yuma to grow and prosper over the last century,” said Charles Flynn, the Heritage Area’s executive director. “The other truly amazing thing is that, one hundred years later, construction and technology from 1912 is still working just as it was designed to, back in the day.”
The new exhibit is located at the Yuma Quartermaster Depot State Historic Park, next door to which water still bubbles through the Siphon “full stream ahead” into the Yuma Main Canal. The U.S. Reclamation Service made its first home in the then-vacant Quartermaster Depot when it launched the Yuma Project in 1904, its first major undertaking in a storied history that transformed the West with other “little” projects like Hoover Dam.
In the same offices where early Reclamation engineers once worked (only then without air conditioning and other conveniences), giant graphics and a new six-minute video explain the challenges they faced here, from building Laguna Dam a few miles upstream where the bedrock was covered with hundreds of feet of river silt, to the epic feat of burying the Siphon so it couldn’t be destroyed by flooding.
Using 1912 equipment and engineering know-how – and employing East Coast sand hogs who’d worked on subway tunnels in New York and Boston – the builders of the Siphon drove a 14-foot diameter concrete tube 965 feet through the sandstone 50 feet beneath the river bed. Because the 76-foot California drop shaft is higher than the 74-foot exit in Arizona, water then and now moves through the structure by natural siphon action instead of being pumped.
Fervent local enthusiasm for the project is reflected through vintage newspaper headlines such as “Hail to the new Yuma – the Queen of the desert, the Alexandria of the American Nile.” A large-scale photo wall allows modern-day viewers to walk under the “Yuma – Gateway to the Great Southwest” marquee that spanned Main Street when Laguna Dam was completed. Other photos outline the history of the Yuma County Water Users Association, founded in 1903 as the granddaddy of all irrigation districts.
Best part of the bash? The new exhibit is free – you don’t even need to bring the Siphon a birthday card.