Franklin F. Snyder
I'm going to stop you for just a minute.
A ..
So Mr. Azeemuddin called me, and I went down and talked to him down at his
hotel. He was really a character, but we seemed to hit it off pretty good so he saw
to it that I got on the board of consultants that would be handling the consulting part,
act as the consultants for his company. His was the only firm involved. There may
not have been an international company at that time. He was sort of international.
I think his company handled the whole business. They were studying a possible dam
site on the famous river that just recently they had floods there again.
Q ..
The Ganges?
A
Ganges, yes. And the capital there of.
Q ..
India is right on it, I think. New Delhi?
A ..
No, it's Dacca then, Dhaka now. When the river got high, the whole city would be
surrounded with water. A later project that I was on was studying the idea of
building a levee around the city with a lot of pumps to pump in and pump out. I
don't think that ever got off the ground. But anyhow, at this time, they were
studying the possibility of a dam on the Ganges just below the Indian border. So I
had several, two or three, trips to East Pakistan at that time working for ACE and
the World Bank. One time we were there, it was the time when they had a major
disaster.
Dhaka is quite a fair-sized city, and there was one of the international hotels there
that we stayed in. We flew up to near the dam site. While we were out, they had
the typhoon on the Bay of Bengal. That was the one that drowned some 500,000
people. It was the worst one they have had in recent years. So we got word that if
we wanted to land at the airport should we get back. So we went back before we
planned and landed at the Dacca Airport.
In the newspaper, I saw an Associated Press item that said that a World Bank
consulting team was lost in the southern area in this typhoon. That they had been
down there and were unreported. As soon as I saw that in the paper, I knew my
wife would see it here, so I sent a telegram. She heard about it a day or so before
she got the damn telegram and it did worry her. She called up Wendell Johnson and
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