Engineer Memoirs
Q:
By the time you'd left civil works, you'd seen the project planning process in the
division and seen it from the headquarters. How efficiently and how well did it work?
A:
It didn't work as well as it should. It's interesting because Jack Morris was very
anxious to get this thing rolling. He came up with a lot of good ideas. And I spent a lot
of time as division engineer on this. When I was a member of the Board of Rivers and
Harbors, I had looked at it and spent a lot of time trying to get an efficient program set
up in which you could do a study in three years and decide up or down.
What basically thwarted this was the fact that the process became so complicated with
environmental impact statements and public hearings and the like that you just couldn't
do it.
If you had a simpler idea--for instance, if it was a flood, you went out and built a flood
wall or channelized the river or built a dam--you could do it. But when you had to
consider everything that happened as a result of this construction, the environment was
just too complex.
Can the planning process cope with these complexities? The problem is epitomized by
the Locks and Dam 26 project. They wrote an environmental impact statement for one
lock, which basically was not too hard because one lock was simply required to
maintain traffic where it was.
So the environmental impact statement said, if we build one lock, it won't be any
different from what it is now. Then you start trying to come to grips with two locks.
If they built two locks, this would certainly open the way to a much greater flow of
traffic. When you start trying to analyze all the environmental and other effects of
doubling or tripling the barge traffic on the Mississippi River and all the dredging and
everything, you could study for a thousand years and you wouldn't get it right.
When you were in an era where you didn't really care about all these secondary
effects--you were mainly worried about whether the primary effect of more traffic was
good--then fine. But if you get to all the secondary effects of this change, for example,
and the dredging and the silting, it's endless. It's beyond man to divine. After they've
built these projects, they don't know whether they're beneficial--for instance, the
Aswan Dam. So how in the world could they make a plan in advance to know? It's too
complex.
Q:
Bill Badger, when he was district engineer of Saint Paul just a couple of years ago,
complained to me that the civil works staff at OCE was full of termites and
technocrats--that was his phrase--who studied a project to death.
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