Franklin F. Snyder
meteorologist, Thomas Thompson, a geologist, and myself. We spent about three
weeks in the field. So we had quite a trip there and they really took care of us.
We spent a week in Ethiopia, because that`s where most of the water came from out
of Ethiopia into the Sudan. The Italians had taken over Ethiopia for a `number of
years. They established a lot of rainfall stations and not so many stream gauging
stations, but a lot of rainfall stations. So there was a lot of rainfall data available.
Some of it was published, too, and we collected some other data, too.
We had an appointment to see the Emperor Haile Selassie. Then the party broke up
and some of us went one place, and some went another, and so they canceled the
meeting. But previously, I guess it was in Helsinki, that my wife and I had met a
Jesuit who was from, what's the capital of Ethiopia?
Q ..
Addis Ababa?
A ..
Yes. This Jesuit was in Addis Ababa and apparently he was Haile Silassie's right-
hand man on weather forecasting, so I looked him up when we were in Addis Ababa
and we had him in for dinner. He told us, I forgot what the story w a s , some
interesting story about how he had gotten Haile Selassie's attention and became his
favorite weather forecaster.
Thompson, a geologist, was looking at field indications of past flood levels to get
an idea of the historic, or non-historic events that might have happened. He was
scheduled to go on a helicopter trip. The day before he was to go, the helicopter
was out on some other job and it crashed and killed one of the pilots and one of the
passengers. So he figured maybe he was lucky he just missed it by one day.
I don't like helicopters, although I flew from Athens all of the way, I suppose it
must have been 200 miles up to the northern part of Greece to see a dam site in a
military helicopter. There wasn't any landing place for a regular plane and because
of time schedules, they took me up in a helicopter. But that's diverting. But
anyhow, we had quite a nice stay in, I'm trying to think of the capital of Sudan.
Q ..
That's Khartoum, isn't it?
A
Khartoum, yes. We stayed at an old English hotel which had a view out over the
Nile River. Some places we'd only use bottled water, and other places we could use
the regular water. But I guess we were using bottled water in Khartoum. We were
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