Vernon
floods were concerned. Dealing with some of their bosses, we had some conferences and
there was a lot of controversy and so forth. You're always going to have continuing
controversy on that subject.
But the Bureau has really turned around on probable maximum flood. It has gotten them
quite a bit of work because they can build up their projects-do redesign on some of their
projects. They went into Congress with a Dam Safety Bill, and they said, "Hey, we've
got all these projects that need to be upgraded, and it's up to you to give us the money to
do it.
Well, the Corps didn't do that. They took a different approach in trying to upgrade their
projects. They were all presumably designed for the probable maximum flood, but
through the years, changes have taken place and some of those probable maximum storms
were actually bigger than they had been when they were originally derived. So the Corps
had some dams that weren't up to the top standard either anymore.
Then we got into the Gianelli [William Gianelli, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil
Works,
era where he didn't want to spend any money on dams or dam safety
or anything of that nature because the administration didn't want to spend it. He was very
strong in not spending any money and dam safety was one of the things he wasn't too
interested in. We had a hard time selling dam safety to him because as far as he was
concerned anything that had such a rare probability of happening, why he didn't want to
waste the government's money on it.
While he wanted to give a little token support for dam safety, he really didn't want to
spend a lot of money on it. We didn't get very far with him on the Dam Safety Program
while he was there. Since there were people promoting this concept of using risk analysis
in designing the safety of dams and there are a lot of highly competent people that were
promoting risk analysis when they designed dams.
Of course, that brings the economics into the picture and it brings probability of floods
into the picture, rare floods, real rare floods, which all the statisticians say you can't do.
But still people would come up and say they could do it. It means things like evaluating
the loss of life. If you've got a big dam, like these Missouri River Dams, and they fail,
a lot of people are going to drown likely. What is their life worth? All that kind of stuff
really has to be cranked into the studies if you're going to do a real thorough risk analysis
study.
There were quite a few years where there were all kinds of meetings going on. All kinds
of conferences promoted on dam safety. Then the Federal Emergency Management
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