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After the questionnaire of "Kamo-gawa river and People's lives", we visited some old people in our town and asked them more questions about the dams of Kamo-gawa river, the water filtering plant, the water works and the pipelines. Through those studies, we've come to understand how hard the people in old days worked in order to make use of the water of the river, and that they kept good relations with the river by making various devices. After visiting the old people, we studied the history of the relations between the river and the people, walking to the monuments of the dams, the water filtering plant, and asking some townspeople more questions.
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From the Edo era(1603-1867) to the early days of the Meiji era(1868-1912),they built the dams in Kamo-gawa river and the irrigation channels of rice paddies. In the mountainous places they dug ponds and made use of rainwater.
There had been ten or more dams in this area (the lower reaches of the Kamo-gawa river), but the drought at the close of the Edo era and the flood of 1893 broke some of the them and six dams remained. Then, because of the worn-outdams and the repeated floods and droughts, they planned to demolish the three dams of the lower reaches of the river, and, instead, to build a big one under the Kamo-gawa River Repair Projects. However, some people demanded to demolish the other three of the upper reaches and build a bigger one.After all, they adopted the latter plan in 1959. A heavy rain came in July 1963, when they were preparing to build the dam. And the construction got under way in December of the same year as the Natural Disaster Relief Projects of Okayama Prefecture and completed in March 1966.The dam has made it possible for us to use the water of the river without any influences of the weather. (See the Monument of the Big Dam of Ryu-ga-tsume.)
In those days, people would use the water from the irrigation channels for washing, bathing and sometimes drinking instead of the water from wells. However, because of the drought at the year end of 1967, the water did not come up from the wells, the water of the river became muddy, they had a terrible shortage of water. That's why they discussed the problem in February 1968 and built the easywater works, pumping the water from the wells with electric motors. And they organized the Water Works Cooperative and the coop has been controlling the water works.
With the completion of the Chugoku Run-Through Road in 1974, the farm land along the lower reaches of Kamo-gawa river began to turn into housing land and, consequently, they needed sewage disposals.And the Rationalization Projects of the Irrigation was set up in 1972 and broke up in 1988. The projects had three aims: first, to use the farming water effectively,secondly, to reduce the burdens of the farmers, and thirdly, to supply the water to Tsuyama City. In the projects, one flow-in mouth is used for two dams, Kamo-gawa and Oide, and the irrigation channels are pipelined.As a result,we have two channels,the one for irrigation and the other for sewage, toprevent the sewage from flowing the dirty water into the irrigation. What's more, the pipes hardly let the water leak and the extra water from the irrigation channels go to the water filtering plant of Kusakabe for drinking.In our area, too, we have been using the water supply system since 1975.At present, the pipelines reach the rice paddies and the farmers can control the water whenever they need it, and considerably reduce their labor.
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