Engineer Memoirs
A:
No, except that I have to admit, when it came to the technical details of these things,
I did examine and question things. If they were proposing something and it seemed
questionable to me, I didn't hesitate to ask questions.
There were technical issues. I remember we had problems with stream enhancement
near the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit. We were putting in a floodway and were
having trouble with the concrete. The design called for digging a V-shaped ditch, then
pouring a concrete liner. In one of my visits to the project, we had quite a technical
discussion about overcoming problems with the concrete liner.
I never hesitated to review the technical aspects--I felt that was different. I was
speaking earlier about management. I didn't want to interfere with what people they
used or how many people they used--things like that. I wanted them to handle the
scheduling.
Occasionally, when the district engineer or the project engineer would put up a
schedule, it would be incomplete, or the arithmetic wouldn't be right. That would call
for a question, such as "What's the cost of this study?" They'd give a figure. Then
you'd say, "What is your assumed number of man-years?"
Then it would be evident that they were planning to spend a lot more money than they
had people. This led into an issue that recurred frequently when I was Director of Civil
Works. This was the problem of whether there was a logical mesh between the number
of people available and the amount of money to spend.
The districts tended to keep more people around than they could pay for. It was a
natural tendency not to want to let people off, even if the workload in dollar terms was
dropping.
When I was in the North Central Division, we started a rigorous analysis. If a district
had a certain size program, how many man-years of government effort did that involve?
And if that was the number of man-years, what was the strength going to be?
In the Corps there had been all kinds of problems over manpower--the numbers of
people--constant fighting. Very often we were subject to reductions of manpower by
the Office of Management and Budget. After all, the Corps had had a huge force
account during the 1930s, when a lot of this work was done by the government rather
than by contract. The Corps has been going down in strength for years. There was a lot
of argument about the proper way to decide who would get people and who wouldn't.
If there was to be a cut, who would lose?
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