Vernon
uses for backwater.
Another thing that backwater profiles give you. In designing levees you need to know
what the top of the levee should look like. You use that water surface or whatever design
flood to decide on the top of the levee. You put freeboard above the water surface so that
waves won't go over.
Q ..
Now you were working in the upper Missouri area at that time.
A
Right.
Ratios
Q ..
The early
was before they really had all the big main stem dams in up there. So you
had a lot of flood calculations to do then?
A
Right. Well, I first worked for the Bureau for a little while. Of course, the Bureau
doesn't do flood calculations. When the Bureau of Reclamations builds a dam and it has
flood control storage, they go to the Corps of Engineers to find out what the benefits are
from whatever storage they can make available for flood control.
So they don't actually do the flood computations in the Bureau of Reclamation. They have
to go to the Corps. The Corps has responsibility for flood control. So they go to the
Corps to get that. Likewise, if the Corps has any irrigation in one of the projects that they
were building, the Bureau of Reclamation would take care of deciding how much benefits
there were connected with it, who got it and all that sort of stuff.
Q ..
Now that's a particularly significant subject isn't it--the whole area of benefit/cost
ratios?
A
Oh yes. It has even become more and more of a concern to the Executive Branch of the
government and to the Legislative Branch, too. They want to be sure that the federal
funds we invest in water resources have a pretty good chance of providing equal or more
benefit. Otherwise they don't want to invest the money. They do benefit/cost analysis on
almost everything. Not just water resources but all kinds of things, they try to figure out
whether they're going to get equal returns from the money they invest.
Previous Page
