Vernon
Q ..
What is always interesting to me are the personal relationships you develop with people
and how they can shape your career as far as what you study and your interest in subjects.
Was Mr. Gibbs in that category?
A
He and my immediate supervisor, Ed Hower, he was very supportive. Actually, he didn't
have the technical capabilities that Phil Gibbs had. But he was a good manager and he
tried to make opportunities available for us when he could, and to make our jobs
interesting. We used to get to go on a lot of field trips and do a lot of visiting with
people, ranchers and so forth. Going out and looking at irrigation projects and checking
where water was being diverted and that type of thing.
We'd go up in the mountains and take pack animals and horses and go up there and spend
a week or two. About all we'd eat were trout which we caught fly fishing. We'd do some
surveying while we were up there and stream gauging, and things like that. So it was a
pretty interesting job.
Q ..
Sounds like a lot of fun. You were doing your job and having a vacation at the same time.
A
Just about it.
Backwater Studies
Q ..
So those were the field investigations. You just took those observations, or the data you
collected up there, and you`d bring it back and make your reports on that basis?
A ..
Right. We'd use that data to do the computations. We'd have to do backwater studies,
and we needed cross sections of the channel and we needed to know what kind of flow,
we'd get rating curves for the channels, what to plot, stage vs. discharge. We'd do that
with these stream gauge measurements. We'd need profiles of the stream bottom to know
what the slope of the stream was and that type of thing.
Q ..
Now that's how you figured out the volume that flowed through the area and the
sedimentation and all that?
A
Well, that's part of the process--you use all that various data you get to help you make the
different types of hydrology and hydraulics computations.
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