Water ResourcesPeople and Issues
the estimated cost of a user day, and they could put it right into the same kind
of analysis they'd been applying to tallying up flood losses or returns from
irrigated crops. The alternative approach would have required their looking
at the whole pattern of land use and structure of the community, what
influence the proposed change in recreational land use might have on the
community, and what other alterations might be made in recreation.
Q: This is perhaps an unfair question since you're trained as a geographer, not
as an engineer, but do you have any kind of evaluation of the skills of the
engineers in the Corps in the 1960s? Do you think they were well trained to
do the work they were doing?
A: I think they were moderately well trained to do what they were supposed to
be doing. They were not trained to do much innovative work. I would say
in the late sixties the Corps was beginning to change in the sense that it was
making more conscious efforts to introduce new views and to encourage its
professional members to reach out and understand what other groups were
doing.
Q: In the early 1960s the Harvard water group developed some interesting new
procedures for evaluating water projects, procedures that involved the use of
computers, for one thing, computer simulation. Did you have any opportunity
to observe how willing the Corps was or other federal water resources
agencies were to accept these new kinds of procedures?
A: At the time I thought that the Harvard water program was highly imaginative
and thoughtful, and I thought Maass and Hufschmidt clearly had a major
impact on the thinking of people who came there. The participating
individuals were, on the whole, enthusiastic. They had a sense of being part
of a new mode of thought. Then they returned to their offices and, according
to the testimony of a few of them whom I knew-and I knew only a small
proportion-they were faced with trying to support new viewpoints and their
new skills with members of the staff who were not convinced. They were
very cautious about it. I'm sure that Maass and Maynard Hufschmidt have
ideas now about ways in which their training was translated into action. And
I certainly, in terms of individuals, felt that the Harvard program had a major
effect.
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