In 1851 the Tuolumne County Water Company was organized to divert water from the South Fork of the Stanislaus River; by 1853 it consisted of of canals serving as many as 1,800 miners and their claims. Water was supplied as far as Columbia and Sonora, to the south. The Columbia and Stanislaus River Company was formed in 1854 on the main stem of the Stanislaus River, in competition to the high rates charged by Tuolumne. They built a ditch at a cost of $1.5 million (five times the original estimate), went bankrupt shortly after, and was ultimately sold to the Tuolumne County Water Company at a small fraction of the original cost. Massive amounts of lumber were required to build the mining flumes and aqueducts, leading to widespread deforestation in the lower elevations of the Stanislaus basin. These early waterworks were crudely built and often failed, sometimes with tragic results. In 1857, a dam on the South Fork of the Stanislaus River collapsed, flooding the mining camps of Pine Log and Italian Bar, killing sixteen people. Only a few years later, most of the mining claims and infrastructure were destroyed by the 1862 flood.