Vernon
Q ..
How much has the Corps gone into automated data gathering where they have a remote
station?
A ..
They do have some of that but it's so expensive that it can't really cover all of the areas.
You still have to use a lot of this individual help. There are all kinds of volunteer helpers
as far as rain gaugers are concerned. They have a lot more automated stations now than
they used to have, but they are still far from being adequate to cover all that they would
like to have.
Q ..
Because you're dealing in all of the basin areas?
Yes, the basin is so big and the variability of the rainfall is so great that the changes--well,
A
just like in Washington here. It can be raining like heck over at my house and not even
raining at your house. I measure two inches of rain and you measure zero. If you don't
have any measurement device over at your house, you may assume it rained two inches
at your house, too. See that's the kind of a problem we run into in getting good
information on rainfall.
You can't get the gauges close enough together to be sure you've got a real accurate
measurement of the aerial distribution of the rainfall. You do the best you can.
Projects Relating to the Garrison Dam
Q ..
Now when you went to Garrison in
the dam was under construction. So what kind
of projects were you involved with there?
Well, some of the projects related to the Garrison Dam itself. I was in the hydrology and
A
hydraulics branch. The first year I worked there I worked in hydrology. I did a lot of
work on small projects--we were starting to regulate the reservoir even though the project
wasn't complete, we were still filling the reservoir and we still had to make releases and
forecasts on inflow and decide what the release is going to be and that sort of thing.
We were getting instructions, we had teletype connection with the other districts and also
with the Missouri River Division. They would give us instructions on generally what we
were suppose to do and then we would have to try to figure out--one of the problems we
had, of course, in a big reservoir like that was knowing what the pool level
We were getting inflow based on the difference in the water surface at the beginning of