Vernon
the Sun River by headwater dams, you know adding to their Gibson Darn way up in
the mountains and so forth. Of course, we in the Corps argued that they were only
controlling a small part of the drainage area and that wouldn't do very much for flood
control.
But history made it look good for the Bureau because the major floods had happened up
in the mountains. They hadn't really had a major storm over this big drainage basin
between Gibson Dam and Great Falls. Maximum flow at Great Falls at the time I was
working at it was about 17,000 cfs [cubic feet per second]. I worked on the standard
project flood with some guidance from
on the rainfall.
I worked up that standard project flood. I come up with a value of like 60,000 cfs, or
something like that. So much more than they had ever had there that I thought, "Boy, I'm
going to have a heck of a time selling this to anybody that would be willing to design for
that big of a flood because traditionally if you had something that is quite a bit bigger than
the people had seen before, you have a hard time selling it."
But my boss has accepted everything that I had done, and
accepted it [and it]
went right on through and got approved. They didn't build at that time, but many years
later the Omaha District was handling that project up there and they had a big storm in
`62, I think, or something like that, and it almost reached the standard project flood that
I had computed back in those days. Just to show that just because you haven't had some
doesn't mean you're not going to get it. The big thing about hydrology is trying to
convince people that a potential for floods is there in a lot of cases, even though you
haven't experienced it.
The Theory of Hydrology
Q ..
A lot of what the hydrologist does is basically theoretical then.
Oh yes.
A
Q ..
It's hard to sell people on theory, isn't it?
A
Oh, very difficult. Well, you take this big drainage area like we had, a pretty big drainage
area above Great Falls there. We knew there was a lot of potential for storms up in that
area. We knew where storms had occurred all around it, and we knew the size of those
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