Franklin F. Snyder
You won a medal for that one.
A ..
Yes, I did. W .G. Hoyt was the man that I worked for in the Geological Survey.
He always encouraged me and helped me out. He probably had something to do
with me getting the medal.
Q ..
Now, what was the primary thrust of this article?
A
It was operating the TVA system of dams, because the way they worked, when they
were under normal power operations, each dam had a pool behind it. But then
during flood times, they gradually would open up their spillways and the river would
convert from a series of steps into an open river condition. These were routing
procedures, and the flood wave would move through those areas. They were deeper
than they would normally be, and the flood wave would move through there faster
than what you would expect. These routing procedures were developed almost
primarily for the TVA system. I don't know that anybody ever tried them anywhere
else.
Q ..
So it's primarily to keep the releases under control then so you wouldn't get certain
river stages too high?
A
It was more to find out what the levels would be, because when the flood got real
bad most of the main stream dams would be opened as much as they could open
them so they wouldn't be causing backwater. But Chattanooga got flooded every
once in awhile. It w a s more for use in studies. I don't know that the flood
forecasting people ever used it. We were in a different branch from the people
doing the flood forecasting. I think Jim Goddard was in charge of their field work,
and I mentioned that Dembowski (also at Camp Rocking) from Ohio State was in
the field. I think Jim was in charge of that sort of thing.
Q ..
I also noticed that you had a number of discussion papers that you submitted, or had
submitted, to the ASCE Proceedings in `35, `38, `39, 40, `41, and `44. Do you
recall what the primary subjects were and why you wrote those articles, those
discussion comments?
A
They would all have been in the field of rainfall and runoff relations, flood routing,
or flood forecasting, that sort of thing. Writing a discussion of a paper is a way of
getting some of your own ideas out in the open, too. I'm sure that's what most of
Previous Page
