Vernon
Q ..
Well, when they've been around a long time people like that, they probably saw these guys
as captains and majors, so they think of them as kids.
A
They've been around quite a while, they saw that three-star general when he was just a
light colonel, so they're probably not as overly impressed with them as somebody who had
never seen them in that lesser role.
But, anyway, it was just kind of
to me that a lot of the people around, they were
always kind of acting like, "Gee, should I even talk to this guy because he's a general
l
But I never saw those guys ever appear like they were uncomfortable dealing with them.
Redesigning Projects
Q ..
A while ago we talked about redesigning projects. We were talking about the maximum
flood storms. What would you do if you redesigned a project, like BuRec? You said they
were redesigning their projects. Would you redesign to give the pool more capacity or
would you put more capacity on the tributaries?
A
Well, every project is different--there are practically no two projects that are exactly the
same. In many cases, the answer is to make the spillway bigger because it is usually
cheaper to make a bigger spillway than it is to raise the height of the dam. It is very
expensive to raise the height of a dam. So usually they try to figure out some way to pass
more water without causing a problem. In some cases, it is possible; in others it isn't.
Like you say, they could also, for example, put another dam upstream that would give
them additional total storage to help take care of the big flood. But, of course, that gets
kind of expensive too.
But there are a lot of different kinds of solutions that are used. For example, in the
Federal Dam Safety Program, in order to do a really intense study, what they called the
follow-up study of the initial hydrology and hydraulics, they'd get into a detailed analysis
of the dam after it had been declared unsafe. They'd go back and make a restudy. That
would cost quite a bit of money to do that more in-depth study.
Some of these dam owners, rather than spend the money to go out and do more in-depth
study, would spend the money and widen the spillway or make it a little deeper, big
enough to take care of that probable maximum flood that they had come up with in the
initial study rather than to make sure that it was the right answer. So it was cheaper for
them to send some bulldozers out there and make the spillway bigger in the small dams
than to spend all that time studying it. "Hell, we don't get anything by studying, all we
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