background experience to know how to effectively operate reservoirs and how to get the
most out of the storage. How to do the reservoir regulation studies.
That was one little problem that I had with John Morris when I
to Washington.
He was the Director of Civil Works. He had some concepts when he was in Missouri
River Division of putting the water control management that McClendon was in charge of
under the Operations Division. His argument for doing that was that, "Hey, the people
who come in contact with the general public are the operations people. They're always
are you making these release rates?' None of them know
asked questions about,
what the answer is. They said, "Well, you've got to call McClendon. He's the one that
decides all of that.
General Morris said, "Water control management ought to be part of the Operations
Division. So we had a little argument about that one day in his staff meeting, and I told
him, "You really don't want to do that. I said, "In the first place the people that know
how to do water control management like McClendon come from a hydrology background.
When you get into district offices where you have water control management
responsibilities, they don't have extensive work all year round. They have a lot of work
to do during floods and during emergencies and droughts. But they don't have a nice
steady load so to speak."
Their load varies. So if they are a part of the hydrology group, they can work on planning
studies or design memorandum studies when they're not doing their water control
management. So you get more effective use out of them, you get to use their hydrologic
knowledge. Otherwise, if you didn't do that you'd have them doing some routine thing
that didn't take advantage of their expertise in hydrology. You'd have them out there
mowing the grass or some darn thing just to keep them busy.
Anyway, he didn't argue with me about it. He just said, "Well, I still think there is a
problem with communication between the public and the people who decide on the release
rates. So you need to pass that information out. I have to agree with him on that. But
it is just his concept of how it was going to be done that bothered me. He never did
anything about it after our conversation unless he kind of decided, "Well, maybe just let
it go or something. He never moved on his proposal, and I never heard anymore about
it from him after that.
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