Vernon
assign what kind of money a person would spend on a day at the lake. They would
interview people and say, "What did you come to the lake for?" [Some] said, "I come to
fish." They'd say, "Well, how much money do you spend?" [They'd] ask them to fill out
a questionnaire and say "How much money did you spend to come here for a day of
fishing?
After interviewing a lot of people, they got a pretty good idea of how much an individual
person would invest to spend a day at the lake. Now, if a person is willing to spend that
much money to come to this project for two weeks, then that's a benefit to society. If you
didn't spend it here, you'd spend it someplace else.
With those kind of surveys and analyses, they were able to say, "Well, we have been
keeping track of the people that came there." They got a sample of how many come for
fishing, how many come for just an outing for the day, or something like that. With the
proper mix why they were able to then say, "Well, 30 percent of the people come here for
a picnic, 50 percent of them come to fish, 10 percent just for a boat ride." You know,
different things like that.
Then knowing the benefit for each one of these things, they could then come up with a
total benefit for the project. But then there are a lot of other complicated things that have
to get in there, too. How far away will these people come from? If they've got a lake
here and there is no other lake around for 200 miles then they have a draw from a bigger
segment than if there was all kinds of lakes and not very many people. So they've got to
take all those things into consideration.
Flood
Q ..
I know it's a very complex, like you say, sophisticated approach. On the upper Missouri,
did you run into any particular problems that you had difficulty coming to conclusions on?
I don't mean projects that didn't make it, but engineering problems that you ran into when
you were working with
Problems for which you had difficulty in finding
solutions?
Well, some of the things that you need to estimate are very difficult when it comes to
A
deciding the operation and the management of the storage you have available in reservoirs.
For example, when you're in that part of the country a good share of the runoff that you
get comes from snow-melt. Okay, now if you can forecast how much runoff you're going
to get, say early in the year in January, you can start filling the reservoirs up or you can
capture that snow runoff. If you've got a lot of snow and you know pretty much how
Previous Page
