Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
That's how it got started and got formalized. They designed courses for specific purposes.
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They designed hydrology courses for planners so they would learn enough about
hydrology so they could do a better job in planning. You know historically hydrology,
for example, has been a training ground for a lot of the planners because the basics of
hydrology are what they need to do good planning. If they don't understand hydrology,
it's pretty hard to do water resources planning.
That's another area where the Corps has kind of gone through different phases of how they
handle things like planning or like water quality. Years ago when I first started--in that
branch in Garrison District we had a sedimentation section, a hydrology section, a
hydraulics section, and the reports section they called it. I worked in three of the four
sections there.
But a reports section is really what we call planning today. Well, the planning at that time
had a very small niche in the whole program. It was done in this reports section. But as
we got into these Water Resources Development Acts by Congress, and they wanted more
planning in this economic analysis, more sophisticated planners became more important
all the time. It was tough to get that going the way Congress wanted it done.
Because first of all your top civilian in the district office was the chief of engineering. He
had the highest grade and when the District Engineer needed any kind of a decision on the
technical matter, he would go to the chief of engineering. There was continuity from year
to year on what had gone on in the past on technical decisions because the same civilian
stayed there usually for a long--some of those chiefs of engineering were there for years
and years and years. They weren't about to start any of this new planning crap. They
didn't like it and they knew how to design things, they didn't need anybody to tell them
how to do engineering.
So it was very difficult to get planning off the ground. But when they did start getting
planning positions, where did they go to find people to fill them? They went to the
hydrology people. A lot of the top jobs in planning, the early planning bobs], came from
the hydrology side of the house because they were the only ones that really had enough
background to do some of the planning until the Rivers and Harbors Board [Board of
Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, BERH] got their training program started so they
actually had real formalized training in courses for planners where they would bring them
in for a whole year and train them in how to plan projects.
Then the top jobs started going to those people that had that kind of training instead of
picking from some other job like hydrology. But even the people that went to those
courses, a lot of them were in hydrology and they went on and got that additional planning
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