Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
engineers that I've seen in charge. I had some good chiefs of engineering along the way,
too. Some really good ones.
Q ..
When you were in positions like those at Fort Peck, did you have much to do with the
people from Missouri River Division?
A
Well, they were, of course, our supervisors in a way. Not day-to-day supervisors, but
they had to review everything we did. Once in a while, they would come out there and
go over the studies we were doing and tell us whether they thought we were going in the
right direction and that sort of thing.
used to come out there once in a while
and give us direction.
At Fort Peck, well, I really didn't get as much at Fort Peck as I did at Garrison. I had
more dealings with the division at Garrison then we did in Fort Peck. But in Fort Peck--
well, I was only there for about a year. I worked in the Hydrology Department there and
a good share of my time was spent on the Sun River Project, a levee project up in Great
Falls which was an interesting project from a standpoint that the engineering work I did
on that I use to help get my professional registration at that time in Montana.
You had to submit evidence of actual engineering work on a particular project of some sort
in order to get registered. You don't have to do that anymore. But in those days that was
part of the requirement. So I used the studies I had done on Sun River to help get
registered.
Q ..
That sounds like a healthy idea, actually, doesn't it?
A
Well, it is one, but they just don't require that anymore. It was more tough really, I think,
at that time to get registered in Montana than it is now because of the fact that you may
not have had very many significant design jobs in the first four years you work because
you may be working as an underling for somebody else on most everything and not have
something you can point to and say, "Hey this is my original work, and I was the guy that
was responsible for getting this completed and so forth.
Fortunately I was able to do that on this Great Falls project. The interesting part of it was
that we were designing this--well, most of the time we tried to design levees to take care
of the standard project flood. I don't know if you're familiar with various types of floods
and so forth, but they are a pretty good size flood normally.
At Great Falls the Bureau of Reclamation had made some proposals to protect Great Falls
Previous Page
