Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
changed at all or not. Some people, if you give them enough pressure, might change it
a little bit. Others--they wouldn't change it no matter what. They say, "This is my best
answer and I'm not going to mess with it at all."
But you have to realize, I think, in some areas in hydrology that there is enough margin
there that if you just made it a little bit of a change that you're really not going to hurt
anything. You're not going to be misrepresenting the facts or anything like that and to be
so hard-nosed that you could never move that line one way or the other because you don't
have any way of proving it. Your answer is absolute. If it's for the good of the country
or something, maybe you can move it over.
Q ..
When you get into that kind of theoretical area, though, that's a problem, isn't it?
It's a real difficult problem. How much can you move it though. If somebody says,
A
"Move it a long ways. Oh hell no, I'd never do that, that's obviously wrong. But when
you're right on the verge, right in the middle there where a decision to go one way or the
other could make or break a project, what are you going to do. You're going to get a lot
of pressure and a lot of
the people will say, "Well, there are other benefits that make
up for that anyway so why worry about it. That's a part of it.
Al
use to be very adamant about trying to get as much out of a project, in terms
of degree of protection, as he could. He really pushed for that; most storage you could
get or the highest level of protection in a levee. He'd try to squeeze every bit he could out
of it because he always felt that we hadn't experienced enough of the floods yet. There
were a lot of them coming that we hadn't seen yet and that it was--well, there were a lot
of things that go into the philosophy behind that.
For example, if you build a reservoir, you take a valuable dam site. There are not very
many of them, hardly any of them left anymore. But back in those days, when they were
building a lot of dams, you've got only one dam site there. If you would optimize the
economics of the project and just only put enough storage in there to get a B/C ratio of
1 .O, then what happens is you're really not taking full advantage of the site there.
They may have gotten a lot of room to put in more storage in there that could be used
maybe later on, but you're just not sure of what all those future uses might be. While they
put in future water supply storage in a lot of projects on the bases that the state would say
they needed it in the future. They would put that sort of thing in.
But Al felt that, "Hey, if you spent all the money to build this project, why not put a little
more storage in to give you a cushion to be sure. There were a lot of projects where his
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