On the 4th of November, a little more than two years after the cutting of the lower Mexican intake, the crevasse into which it had grown was closed, and the river was forced back into its ancient bed. The danger had apparently been averted and the Imperial Valley was safe; but where a treacherous river like the Colorado is concerned, danger is never over and safety can be secured only by incessant watchfulness and continual labor. On the 7th of December, another sudden flood came down the Gila and increased the discharge of the Colorado from 9000 to about 45,000 cubic feet per second. The rock-fill dam of the Southern Pacific engineers stood fast; but, about midnight, a reconstructed earthen levee of the California Development Company, twelve or fifteen hundred feet further south, was undermined, began to leak, and finally gave way. The breach at first was small; but it was so rapidly deepened and widened by erosion and caving that it soon became a crevasse, and in less than three days the whole river was pouring through a break a thousand feet wide and again rushing down the slope of the basin to the Salton Sea. This new crevasse, taken in connection with the history and the experience of the two preceding years, showed conclusively: 1, that the tendency of the Colorado to flow into the Salton Sink was increasing rather than diminishing; 2, that floods of from 180,000,000 to 360,000,000 cubic feet of water per hour were liable to occur at almost any season of the year; 3, that the defensive dikes of the California Development Company were everywhere inadequate or untrustworthy; and 4, that in order to afford certain protection to the Imperial Valley, it would be necessary not only to close the new break, but to build a stronger, higher and more massive levee along the west bank of the river for a distance of at least twenty miles.