Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
things like dynamic programming and linear programming, water resource studies, and
that sort of thing.
He had a lot of good theoretical stuff and was a real good professor as far as knowing all
the theory and things that go into it. He was working for the Federal Water Pollution
Control Administration at the time, and they had some kind of backward methods for
doing hydrology. He would come to class and tell us about how his agency was doing
things wrong, and he assumed all the agencies were doing them wrong, too, because his
agency was.
He would tell us about, "Well, here is the way it should be done but it's not being done
that way in my agency." I'd say, "It hasn't been done that way in the Corps for years.
So it is your agency that is backward not the whole government. Anyway, he was going
to bring everybody up to speed on how to manage reservoirs with dynamic
He was going to use dynamic programming because he had written some articles on how
to do it. But in order to do it you had to have loss functions. You had to know that
certain losses would take place if you didn't have enough storage or if you didn't get the
proper releases downstream for all these various purposes such as water quality,
main&ream fishery, and those good things. About the only things you could tie down
the loss functions on were hydropower and flood control.
You couldn't tie them down very good on water supply because you don't really know
what the benefits of water supply are other than the fact that if people are willing to pay
the price for it, it must be worth it. So that doesn't really give you or tell you much about
the benefits of it. All it tells you is that they were willing to pay that price for it.
But then I would say to him, "Well, Ken, you know you're teaching us this stuff about
dynamic programming, and we have loss curves." I said, "Where did those come from?
"Oh, he says, "Well, that's up to the engineers to go out there in the field and get them.
I said, "Don't you realize it can't be done?" "Oh yeah, they ought to be able to do that.
I said, "Ken, it's impossible to come up with any kind of relationships for some of those
beneficiaries that you're talking about and work them into a program where you optimize
the operation so you get the most benefits. I said, "It don't work that way. I said, "It
can't be done.
He says, "Well, it's got to be done." He wouldn't even listen to me until a few years later
after be got in his business and he was doing a lot of hydrology and found out that he
couldn't get some of the information that he needed. He had learned a lot in the days that
had gone by as far as practical application. He didn't need to learn anymore about theory,
he knew enough about that.
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