Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
undesirable.
So what happens is if you build this outlet works that can take water off the middle of the
reservoir or near the top of the reservoir, you get a lot more oxygen in it. The big part
is the oxygen depletion. What happens if you draw off the bottom of the reservoir [is] you
don't have hardly any oxygen in the water and the fish can't survive downstream. If they
swim up the river and they get close to a project that is dumping this oxygen-deficient
water, then they of course die or go on back downstream. They just can't get up close to
the project.
Well, they've come up with different devices to help that situation. They put in mixing
gadgets to stir up the water so that they don't get all this stratification of water, you know,
the good water on the top. Then, when the temperatures change, the water turns over and
what happens is the water on top gets colder and heavier and the whole thing turns over.
You'll find that sometimes in the water supply here it'll have a bad taste to it probably for
a little while when the reservoir turns over until it kind of settles out again. That's when
all this bad and good water will mix up.
Q ..
Were these kind of things with reservoirs fully known when you were working up there
or is that a result of the hydrologic studies that have been done since?
Well, when I first started in the business we didn't even know much about stratification
A
of the reservoirs. We knew a little about it but hadn't had any money to study that sort
of thing much. So it wasn't until after they started learning more and more about how
water quality is important. As a matter of fact, there used to be some strong arguments.
I remember one
well after the Clean Water Acts. When you go back to when they
first started, let's see, the Water Pollution Control Administration [WPCA] was the first
agency I think that handled that sort of thing. They were trying to make other agencies
be responsible for water quality and take a real active role in trying to clean up the quality
and that sort of thing.
One of the things that the Corps used to have is storage in the reservoir for mitigating
water quality damages by discharging flow out of the reservoir. They'd use storage in the
reservoir to dilute the contaminated water downstream, and they claimed the benefit for
it. Well, they finally decided they [the Corps] couldn't get credit for that kind of a benefit
anymore. They said they'd [the Corps] have to clean the water some other way, not use
dilution as a solution. One of the arguments, no more dilution as a solution.
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