A ..
I'm trying to think how the field offices were organized. I suspect that most of the
field offices, the Engineering Divisions had a say in this functional operation. Of
course, the province of the operations people was to provide maintenance and
operating personnel. I imagine that in most of the offices the forecasting and the
functional operation was in the Engineering Divisions. I don't really know for sure.
Q ..
So you think they controlled the reservoirs?
A ..
The functional operations. The instructions would go to the dam tender. I'm sure
he worked for the operations division. It was required that the dam tender be
provided with a set of operating instructions for normal use and for cases of lost
communications. During emergencies, the Weather Bureau and the Corps worked
together on forecasting. I suspect that that was in the engineering, stayed in the
Engineering Division.
Q ..
So you worked with operations people, and you also worked with the design people,
people who did the designs. You had to review their materials plus also provide
them data, didn't you?
A ..
They what?
Q ..
You had to provide them with analysis of the data.
A ..
The Engineering Division, of course, would develop the requirements for the
spillway capacity. The structures people would be in the Engineering Division, too,
so that was a family affair as far as the design was concerned. Then the hydraulic
design people took care of the gates, how the gates worked, the machinery, and the
design of the tunnels. That was another thing that Hathaway, I don't know just how
it started, but every once in a while a project would come in where a dam design
would not have a low-level outlet. Hathaway just wouldn't' let anybody build a dam
that couldn't be drained.
Q ..
Why would that be? I mean not letting them do it, but why would they.
It cost money to build low-level outlets. It cost money to put them in through a
A
dam, and in some cases they were not required for normal operations.
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