Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
Agency [FEMA] was formed, and they got the responsibility for any major disasters in the
country. They were supposed to be the leader on what the Federal Government did in the
area of dam safety and other hazards.
But they didn't really have a lot of expertise on how to do it, they just kind of tried to
organize everybody else They were the chairman of the committee, but they didn't
necessarily have the best expertise on it, they just tried to get the other agencies together
and so forth. They had a lot of private people working on it. Stanford University worked
on it, MIT worked on it, and we had some real firm debates out in Stanford and up at MIT
on what you should do in dam safety.
A lot of these people that were promoting real strong for risk analysis, one of them in
particular, he was one of the most ardent proponent--or had the strongest argument about
using risk analysis and probabilities. I would argue with him about, "Hey, you can't
compute probabilities that accurate. He was a real expert on statistics. He'd say, "Ah
yeah, we can do just as good on that as you can on the rainfall for the probable maximum
flood.
But after they published one of the books on those committees from the National Academy
of Science, he wrote a chapter in the document on risk analysis. He went back to his
home university, and he actually took on a review of some dams up in that area in New
England to see how he could design those for risk analysis. He ended up finding out that
he really couldn't do it. He couldn't get the answers to come up good enough. There was
so much variability in his probability analysis that he couldn't get a good answer, a good
definitive answer in risk analysis. He even stated so in another publication after that.
But there are so many theoretical people from the university who think things should work
by theory until they actually get out in practice. There has been a lot of that happening.
Professors beat the drums and write papers and give speeches and stuff on how to do
things and then when they actually have to go out and prove their technique in a practical
way, they can't do it. But they get everybody allexcited about it, you know, in doing it
that way.
The Gap between the Scientific and Practicing Engineer
Is the value of your advisory committees, bringing in these people to see some realities
and the value of an organization like ASCE, bringing your academic colleagues in with
the practitioners who have to do these things on a day-to-day basis?
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