Canals

Archeologists have found what they believe is the world's oldest paved canal, built about 4,500 years ago near the pyramids of Giza, an Egyptian scholar said Saturday. The canal was probably used to carry water from the Nile for the ritual bathing of the body of Pharaoh Chephren, who ruled from 2558 BC to 2532 BC and whose pyramid is the second largest of the three at Giza, said Zahi Hawass of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority.

They won't be all that much, really. Just a couple of strips of interlocking concrete blocks, each strip about 8 feet wide and perhaps 10 to 12 feet long. But when city workers put them in place today on the muddy banks of Sherman Canal at Dell Avenue, they will be tangible evidence that a 34-year drive to renovate the sadly decayed Venice canal system is still alive. This is not to say that the often delayed Venice Canals Rehabilitation Project is finally under way. That would be premature.

Using new technology that will permit them to pour concrete under water, engineers plan to line a short section of an earthen irrigation canal near here early next year in a $5.1-million experiment that could lead to a water bonanza for urban Southern California. Working while water continues to flow in the large Coachella branch of the All-American Canal, a new machine will line the big ditch with a thin layer of plastic and cover the plastic with a 3-inch blanket of concrete, engineers said.

The bodies of two unidentified men washed up in the Coachella Canal in Riverside County on Tuesday, about seven hours and seven miles apart, authorities said. The first body was found floating in the canal about 10 a.m., next to the Arnold Palmer golf course at PGA West Country Club in La Quinta, said Riverside County Sheriff's Deputy Herlinda Valenzuela. She said the death appeared accidental, and noted that people often make recreational use of the canal. The second body was found about 5 p.m.

Gov. Pete Wilson said Friday that he does not believe a canal around the troubled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta should be attempted in the next seven years--despite a plea from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Wilson's comments came at a ceremony where he signed a $235-million appropriation bill to make possible a historic water sales agreement between the Imperial Valley and the San Diego County Water Authority.

Fifty years of fighting and false starts were so much water under the footbridge Tuesday as a boatload of city officials formally opened the rebuilt Venice Canals, gently joking about the glacial pace of the $6-million project. As a neighborhood leader punted her sailboat-turned-gondola in a wobbly course down Eastern Canal, Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter shrugged off an onlooker's request for an accompanying song--say, something Italian. "This is the canals," Galanter said.

It's not every home that can teach you about light. More art installation than house, really, one luminously redesigned residence on the Venice canals demands that you halt your walk and contemplate its spectral radiance. Saturated paints shift, gradate and commingle with the light. Sit and watch this home flex its wattage long enough, and you'll gain appreciation for the 2.8 million hues your eye is able to perceive. "For me, this house is the most authentic I've ever been," said owner Nely Galán of three structures she recently renovated into a single compound, largely through color.

Federal engineers scrambled to seal two key drainage canals Wednesday amid fears that New Orleans' levees were so weakened by Katrina that they could be overrun by even a peripheral strike from Hurricane Rita, which appeared to be headed for landfall in Texas this weekend. Steel barriers closing off two damaged canals were to be in place Wednesday night, the Army Corps of Engineers said.

As a heavy fog lifted Thursday in Diyala province, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers pressed into a warren of reed-choked canals and found secret tunnels, weapons caches and a roadside bomb. But there was little evidence of the fighters they believed might be massing for a final stand as the joint offensive against a reputed haven and training ground for Sunni Arab insurgents entered its eighth day. U.S.

Seeking to cash in on booming Asian exports, Nicaragua will announce a $20-billion proposal next week to build a canal linking the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans that would accommodate ships too large to use the Panama Canal, Nicaraguan officials said Friday. If approved by Nicaragua's Congress, the project would be a joint public-private venture financed by unnamed investors, said Lindolfo Monjarretz, a spokesman for Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos.