Arizona city seeks moat to secure Mexico border

By Tim Gaynor

YUMA, Arizona (Reuters) - Most plans to gain control of the porous U.S.-Mexico border focus on some combination of fence. But this city in far west Arizona is looking to build a moat.

Faced with high-levels of crime and illegal immigration, authorities in Yuma are reaching back to a technique as old as a medieval castle to dig out a "security channel" on a crime-ridden stretch of the border and fill it with water.

"The moats that I've seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that's kind of what we're looking at here," said Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden, who is backing the project.

Curbing illegal immigration and securing the nearly 2,000 mile (3,200-kilometre) southwestern border are hot topics in this U.S. election year. Washington has pledged to complete 670 miles of new barriers by the close of 2008, despite resistance from landowners and environmentalists.

The proposal seeks to restore a stretch of the West's greatest waterway, the Colorado River, which has been largely sucked dry by demand from farms and sprawling subdivisions springing up across the parched southwest and in neighboring California.

The plan to revive the river, which drains from the Rocky Mountains through the Grand Canyon and runs for 23 miles (37 kilometers) along the border near Yuma, seeks to create a broad water barrier while also restoring a fragile wetland environment that once thrived in the area.

"What you are building is a moat, but it's bringing the life and the wildlife back", said Ogden, an Old West lawman with a handlebar mustache, explaining how the project differs from other plans to fix the border.

"It's innovative thinking. It doesn't take much brainpower to build a 12-foot high fence around something, but this is unique."

RECLAIMING NO-MAN'S-LAND

The project is starting with a desolate 450-acre patch of scrub and thickets known as Hunter's Hole, a once-thriving wetland on the border a few miles southwest of Yuma that has become a haven for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico and a headache for local law enforcement.

"It's in the United States, but it's become a no-man's-land, an area where bodies were dumped, where people and drugs were smuggled over the border," said Ogden, whose deputies share much of the responsibility for tackling border-related crime with federal police.

Engineers plan to dig a "security channel" up to 10-feet (3 meters) deep and 60 feet wide through the problem area, which lies a short way inside the border. The dirt removed would be used to create a levee along the outside to give U.S. Border Patrol agents an elevated patrol road overlooking the line.

The area would also be replanted with native sedges and rushes to provide habitat for threatened local species such as the Yuma Clapper Rail, a secretive marsh bird. Backers say it would also provide a space for residents of Yuma, a farming town popular with winter visitors, to walk and fish.

The organization behind the project would like to extend it the entire course of the Colorado River, which marks the U.S.-Mexico border, in what it sees as an environmental recovery program that complements the Border Patrol's task.

"It doesn't replace the Border Patrol's efforts, it supplements them. At the same time you are restoring habitat in a secure environment and creating a place to relax," said Charles Flynn, the executive director of the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area Corporation.