Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
storms. How much rain had occurred in the time, the distribution of the rain, and so
forth. If you move one of those storms over the basin, you can see that the potential is
great there.
But because that storm hasn't actually happened over their basin, they're very difficult to
convince. But you can show them on paper pretty easily. "Hey look [at] it. All you've
got to do is move this storm over here a little bit and here is what is going to happen."
But they say, "Oh well, I've lived here for 50 years and I've never seen anything like that.
So you must be really imagining things. So it's a tough job trying to sell people on the
risk they face in flooding if they haven't experienced it.
Q ..
So in hydrology you use an awful lot of meteorological data?
A ..
Oh yes.
Q ..
There is a lot of that in your computations.
A
One of the things that the Corps did early on, back in Gail Hathaway's days, was to fund
a big contingent of the National Weather Service to do studies for the Corps. Practically
everything they did was in connection with some Corps project because the Corps was
paying all their salary. To this day, they still pay for a good portion of those people's
salaries.
While they don't dictate exactly what they do or how they do it they just dictate that they
have to work on Corps projects and do the work for the Corps. One of the reasons [was]
that Gail felt very strong about having a component outside of the Corps who really had
no interest in pushing a project or not pushing a project. Where they're completely
unbiased, you might say, in doing a meteorological study.
Whereas, if you are a member of the Corps of Engineers then you may be influenced in
your studies by your boss who wants to have a low answer or a high answer or whatever
he wants to have. He may put a lot of pressure on you and even though you may not think
that you're complying with that pressure you may just say, "Well, I'm really going to try
to get the smallest answer I could to keep peace in the family, or something like that.
I've run into situations like that, too, when we were in Garrison we had a chief of
engineering who didn't like the answer for a standard project flood that he got out of
hydrology because there was so much political pressure on reducing costs in this one
project. He told my boss at that time to go back and redo his studies because he had made
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