I n 1914 a two-mile aqueduct was built just south of Brooks by the CPR and was part of the huge Eastern Irrigation District that stitched fertile but waterless southeast Alberta together. The aqueduct was in use, amazingly, until 1979 when it was abandoned and replaced by a raised canal. The aqueduct carried water from the Lake Newel reservoir across a two mile-wide, 60’ deep valley, dipping below the CPR tracks with a giant inverted siphon. These details do boggle the mind, as does standing by the canal today, the highest point in the surrounding landscape with water running fast and silently on top of a long hill. In 1996 Walter Hildebrandt, who grew up in Brooks, wrote a long poem about this project. He writes about the complex feelings and relationships of building, maintaining and using a grand gesture of engineering and the combination of nostalgia and annoyance that surrounds it; about
the crumbling aqueduct as an enormous metaphor for dreams and disil- lusion, the water carried like an overhead river and about the current of his father’s hidden story of being a German intellectual under Stalin, imprisoned, eventually de-patriated, washing up on the shores of the Palliser Triangle after the war. The aqueduct is a 14’-diameter half-pipe hung from a concrete frame of columns, girders and braces. The pipe was made of steel mesh and gunnite. Evidently it started to leak shortly after completion. Chinook freeze-thaw cycles, an over-alkaline environment, some engineering miscal- culations that increased water resistance — its next sixty years is a saga of repair. It still stands, a very small museum at one end, a spray-painted, beer- bottled haunt for Brooks youth at the other. — SW
The Brooks Aqueduct
the trouble with history was that it was full of failures now we can see what’s left what was left out what you could not predict the materials that let you down the miscalculation what the optimists left out for history to remind us about questions that couldn’t be asked at the time
that were never asked of those who told them you could build a river the way of the future cement steel
electricity railways
ploughed the future forgot the land the people the rain ice and snow the water the power of the land if only you could sell them on the future again
Hildebrandt,Walter. Brooks Coming Home. Images by Peter Tittenberger. Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 1996. p 67.
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O n S ite review
S ewing
I ssue 8 2002
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