Although the Mexican cutting, at that time, had virtually become a crevasse, the flow through it was not great enough to endanger the cultivated lands of the valley. The excess of water overflowed the banks of the canal--the old Alamo barranca--but it ran into the deepest part of the Sink, where it slowly accumulated without flooding anything except the works of the New Liverpool Salt Company. Civil Engineer C. E. Grunsky, of the U. S. Reclamation Service, who made an inspection of the intake three days after the loan to the California Development Company, described the situation as “not serious, but sufficiently alarming to require some attention.” The most disquieting feature of it was the steepness of the incline toward the Imperial Valley as compared with that toward the Gulf of California. The fall of the Colorado from the intake to the Gulf was only one hundred feet, while that from the intake to the bottom of the Valley was nearly four hundred feet. As the distance was about the same, either way, the Valley incline was approximately four times as steep as the riverbed incline, and if the whole stream should break through the intake and go down the steeper slope, the velocity of the current would make the stopping of it extremely difficult, if not absolutely impossible. When a turbulent river, in flood, discharges at the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second down an easily eroded and comparatively steep declivity into an immense basin four hundred feet deep, it soon gets beyond control. The difficulty of dealing with these conditions was greatly increased by the impossibility of predicting or anticipating floods. The annual rise of the Colorado, above its junction with the Gila, begins in the spring, reaches its maximum in July, and subsides to normal about the middle of August. This period of high water is fairly regular and may be counted upon. Floods in the drainage basin of the Gila, however, are capricious, occur at all seasons of the year, and are particularly violent in the fall and winter months. “These floods,” as Mr. Cory says, “are far more to be feared and reckoned with, in preparing and conducting engineering work along the lower Colorado River, than anything coming down the Colorado River proper,” partly because they come suddenly and unexpectedly, and partly because they carry immense quantities of driftwood. During the Gila flood of November 29-30, 1905, the water at Yuma rose ten feet in ten hours, with a maximum discharge of 102,000 cubic feet per second, while driftwood almost completely covered the water surface. Such floods, coming with little or no warning, are almost irresistible.