Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
A
I knew him and probably had some meetings with him, but other than that I had no
relationship. We had, I didn't mention before, but one of the things that the office
was involved was inter-agency committees. First, the Federal Inter-Agency River
Basin Comrnittee, then it was an Interagency Committee. Later on, it was the Water
Resources Council, I believe.
Water Resources Council
They had subcommittees on sedimentation, and hydrology, and power among others.
Al Cochran handled the subcommittee on sedimentation, and I had the subcommittee
on hydrology. There were representatives on the subcommittees similar to the main
committee. The chairmanship rotated each year between the different agencies. So
there were times when I was chairman of that subcommittee just like everybody else
was. The subcommittee on sedimentation set up a field operation-- I forget its name-
-in Minneapolis. was Straub there?
Q ..
There was a St. Anthony's Hydraulic Lab in Minneapolis.
A ..
The agency set up a project to develop equipment for measuring sedimentation in the
rivers, and I think Straub was involved. He was there at the university that had that
laboratory. But I don't recall that he was active in this project that I mentioned. His
name was, I think, involved in that operation. I don't remember who ran project.
Q ..
Now, what kind of things did your subcommittee deal with?
A
Well, I suppose basically the idea was to coordinate activities so that nobody got too
far ahead of the rest of the pack or they could eliminate problems before they
developed. You might ask what was the main committee, too. But that was their
function also. The members of the main committee were the secretaries, but the
people that actually operated were their representatives. But the members were
really the agency secretaries, or the department secretaries. So it was a fairly high-
level committee.
Well, you've got a good question there. We published a set of river basin maps for
the country showing the hydrologic stations. We also controlled the assignrnent of
radio frequencies set aside for transmission of hydrologic data. I remember one time
the frequency of floods was a problem. The frequency is a major factor in the
economic studies and the different agencies were using different procedures and
Previous Page
