Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
They had all the other agencies. They had the Weather Service and the GS [U.S.
Geological Survey] and professors and everybody, but they didn't have the two most
prominent elements of the Corps of Engineers involved in their discussions. The only way
I found out about it was somebody from the Weather Service called me up one day and
said, "Hey, what is going on with this meeting down there? What are you going to do
down there?" I said, "What meeting?" It was ridiculous.
Q ..
What was their explanation?
A
They didn't have any. They never did say why they did that. They didn't have to explain
it, they didn't have to explain anything to me, they don't work for me. They didn't work
for the Director of Civil Works or even the Chief of Engineers when it came to that job.
It was for somebody else. But it just blew my mind to think that anybody that was going
to do something like that wouldn't at least contact the people that they should have been
the closest to.
Apparently, they felt that they didn't want to be bound by traditional procedures that had
been used in the Corps. They wanted to come up with new ideas, I guess. I don't know
what other explanation they had for it.
People: Leo R. Beard and the Hydrologic Engineering Center
Q ..
When the Hydrologic Center was formed, was that formed from people taken from the
Corps? Was it an element taken out of WES or was it just formed mostly wholly new?
A
What happened is that they had research money. All the various elements: hydraulics,
hydrology and soils. Everybody got some of the research money. They had a pot of
research money every year and they divvied it up depending on who could do the best
talking and who they claimed they had the most needs. Hydrology got a chunk of that
money, too, and they would use it for a lot of purposes such as storm studies and other
useful activities.
But they were concluding a lot of those storm studies and a lot of the special studies that
they had been done, unit hydrographs studies and others. A person that was in OCE,
R.] Roy Beard, I'm sure you've heard of him if you've been interviewing anybody in
hydrology. His name always comes up because he was the
director of HEC. But he
was in the Chief's office, and he is a guy who wrote the
textbook for the Corps on
hydrologic statistics.
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