But anyway, there was so much political heat about the difference between these probable
maximum floods between the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation that I think it was the
Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works got together with the Secretary of the
Interior at some party somewhere and they got talking about their differences. They said,
"Well, we need to get together and have the top hydrology people in the Corps and the
Bureau get their heads together and come up with a same procedure for doing this. We
want to find out why there is such a big difference and we want to get that difference
solved.
The Chief of Engineers told me, "You are going to be my representative for the Corps to
get this thing straightened out. The Bureau of Reclamation also had a representative that
had been named, and we had some meetings. We found out right away that the techniques
we used for transferring the storm into hydrographs were pretty much the same--that you
couldn't get much different answers if we both started off with the same rainfall, our
answers would come up pretty close to the same hydrograph.
So we realized right away that the big problem was in the probable maximum storm, not
the hydrograph, but in the storm. Since the Weather Service was doing it for us and the
Bureau of Reclamation was doing their own, the controversy was between those two
agencies not between the Corps and the Bureau.
We had to get the Weather Service and the Bureau of Reclamation working together trying
to see how we could resolve this thing. We finally set up a
of several agencies
and how we were going to do this inter-agency thing.
We agreed on all the stuff east of the 105th [Parallel], primarily because the Bureau didn't
operate east of the 105th. So they agreed that we would all use the Weather Service's stuff
east of that area. But west of that, where the Bureau operated, there were going to be
some more problems about how we went on doing that.
Well, about that time the guy who was in charge of storm studies for the Bureau retired.
They started looking for new staff, and they hired somebody from the National Weather
Service to do the meteorology studies who had been trained in doing it the way the
National Weather Service did it. Not only that, but they were also looking for a new chief
of hydrology. It turned out the guy that got that job had been working in the office in San
Francisco for the Corps and in Albuquerque, and he wanted to get back to the Denver area
where he was from. He got the job as the chief of hydrology for them.
Both of those guys were trained in doing things the same way the Corps did. So they
started influencing what was happening in the Bureau of Reclamation, even though they
had some tough sledding they turned the Bureau around as far as the probable maximum
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