Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
people, they argued with each other.
realized the importance of the other guys' point of view, too. When they got
They
in a room, then the irrigation man had to convince the flood control man why his point of
view was so important. Anyway, they used to be pretty interesting sessions.
Q ..
Was that Missouri Valley Basin Association or compact there in the upper Missouri basin?
Well, there's an upper Missouri Basin Compact. When they decided on how the storage
A
was going to be distributed and all that, why they had an inter-agency, or inter-state really,
agreement, a compact, on who was going to get the storage for irrigation, where it was
going to go, especially on irrigation. Well, some of the states didn't benefit much from
irrigation because the water was downstream from them, so they didn't get the benefits
that some of the states farther on down the river got from the irrigation and power.
Of course, what happened with power, they can run the power back, like to the state of
Montana, even though it's made down in South Dakota or in North Dakota, the power can
be distributed back into Montana. So they get benefits from the project even though
they're upstream from the actual flow of the water. But there are very complex
agreements on how to do all these things.
I was talking about was just the Corps of Engineers' management meeting, and it
didn't try to change anything in the compacts or anything like that. It just says, "Well,
here is how we're going to try to give everybody exactly what is in the compact. But
sometimes if you don't--like I was pointing out before-- you can't actually do it exactly as
you wanted to do it. So you try to figure out how you can do it, and still give everybody
the best deal they can.
An interesting part of it is when you get into one of those tough years when there is a big
flood or something like that, some of the Congressmen and Senators are very difficult to
deal with. Back in the Corps days when I was involved in some of that stuff, we even had
senators from North Dakota tell us, "You're only going to release so much from Garrison
Dam and you're not going to fill the reservoir over so high." We'd say, "Now wait a
minute, how can we do both?" Or, "We can do either one or the other but we can't do
both.
Don't matter what you say or any other person, physical laws just don't allow us to do
that. If you've got so much water that you cannot store it in a reservoir, it's got to go
downstream. You can't just say we're going to put it in there and squeeze it together. But
that's how stern they were and how uncompromising they were--because they had
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