Vernon
I remember even having a big discussion at one of our conferences out in the Pacific
Northwest one time. My boss at that time was Al Cochran. He was head of hydrology
for many years in OCE [Office, Chief of Engineers] and taught me a lot of the things that
I learned and knew about hydrology. But he was real slow to take up this concept of water
quality. He didn't really want to get into it. He just seemed like he was very slow to grab
on to it.
But, anyway, we were having a big conference up there on a reservoir, and I was
concerned about some water quality studies they were doing there. I was telling them,
"Well, even though you're contracting out these water quality studies to some experts that
are not in the Corps of Engineers, you need to get these computer models, you need to be
familiar with them, so you can use them in your reservoir regulation procedures because
you are the guys that are responsible for that water quality. So if you don't do a good job
on it, why the Corps is going to get a bad name, and you've got to work that into your
water quality management.
My boss was sitting there listening to me. He said, "No, no, don't worry about that." I
kind of was taken back quite a bit by his attitude on it. The conference went on and on.
All of a sudden right in the middle of some other discussion, Al booms out, "Wait a
minute." He said, "By god, you do have to do what Hagen said." He says, "I'm wrong,
you do have to be responsible for that water quality. It really surprised me that he did
that. But he got to thinking about it, and he says, "Hey, we do have to do that." So he
made his opinion clear then that we were going to have to be responsible for it.
But it was tough getting people to take on the responsibility of improving the water
quality. Actually it was kind of a thankless job. There was not much money for doing
it. It was a tough, difficult thing to do. Hard to figure out what to do.
Q ..
So the hydrologists would have been some of the first people in the Corps' to have greater
sensitivity to environmental issues dealing with water?
A
One of the things we found out, too, was in training people to deal with reservoir water
quality--now reservoir water quality is the primary thing that we're talking about here.
But yet we found that it was easier to take somebody who was a trained hydrology person,
we'd like to call them. Practically all the people we had in those days were engineers, not
hydrologists per se. A hydrologist doesn't have to have an engineering degree--it can be
a degree in science and not engineering.
We usually had engineers as our hydrology people whereas not necessarily the Soil
Previous Page
