Vernon
don't have the continuity. The Director of Civil Works is there for three years or so, and
the new one comes along and he has to learn which guy he can put the most confidence
in., It takes him awhile until he figures out which one gives him a lot of baloney and
which one gives him the best information. By the time he gets it figured out, he leaves.
Q ..
Yes, that's one of the big problems. The point being the same one that you made,
that they're not really technically that proficient.
Well, they have technical training, obviously, but they haven't been practicing it. They
A
are so busy doing management that they don't have time to sit down and do a statistical
analysis or a backwater study or a structural design problem or something like that.
Experiment Station (WES)
Q ..
Yes, most of those guys who go that way don't end up as Directors of Civil Works.
A ..
They go to the Waterways Experiment Station.
Q ..
Which brings up a question. When you're sitting up there in a place like Garrison and you
have problems, did you get a lot of support out of WES? Did they help you at all? Were
they at all involved in hydraulic studies?
They're very active in hydraulic studies. They're not the organization to do hydrology
A
studies because it has never been emphasized at the Waterways Experiment Station.
Especially after HEC came into the picture.
Now WES does some hydrology studies for other military elements, not the Corps of
Engineers, but other elements of the Army. They do some hydrology for battlefield
hydrology and stuff like that, which I'm not so sure they know what they're doing when
they do it, but they do it anyway and the Corps has no control over it.
As a matter of fact, I recall one year when I was in charge of hydrology and hydraulics.
The Waterways Experiment Station got a research job from another element of the Army,
and they were holding a nationwide conference on what approaches they should be using
to do the studies that they were doing. They didn't even ask me to come to the meeting.
They then asked the Hydrologic Engineering Center to go to their meeting. Here the
whole subject that they were dealing with was hydrology.
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