Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
were involved in cornrnittees. Well, I think Lloyd Duscha has been on some
But the makeup of headquarters, of Hydrology and Hydraulics--you'll hear more about it
from Jake [Douma] when you talk to him. But when I first went in there, there wasn't
much of a hydraulics section per se. There were only two people working in hydraulic
design. In OCE they had designated everything outside of hydraulic design as hydrology.
They even called the branch that Al was in charge of Hydrology and Hydraulics.
The other group that Jake Douma was in was a Structures Branch, and he was an element
of the Structures Branch at that time. There were two people working in hydraulic design,
and he was one of them. There was another one who worked primarily in the area in
Florida, on the Central and Southern Florida Project. But Jake did most of the other
hydraulic design work.
Then hydraulic design started doing more physical modeling down in WES. They needed
more help and they got more into the navigation research, and they were doing a lot of
navigation-type engineering that the hydrology and hydraulics branch didn't do.
Then they were more involved in the coastal engineering. So the coastal and the hydraulic
design part of dams and levees became the big things in the hydraulic design. They really
ended up with three sections in the hydraulic design branch--coastal, navigation, and
riverine hydraulic design.
But hydrology really didn't get much into the coastal area. Especially into the detailed
analysis of coastal studies because there was a Coastal Engineering Research Center
[CERC] anyway, doing that kind of engineering. But the people who were directing
activities were in OCE and were the hydraulic design people, not the hydrology people.
So, then after a while, let's see, when Al left we were still the Hydrology and Hydraulics
Branch. Finally, I guess, when Homer Willis was Chief of Engineering, they decided to
make hydrology and hydraulic design one branch. I was in charge of hydrology at the
time and Jake was in charge of hydraulics.
Jake being the senior man, obviously got the nod since he had been around a lot longer
than I had. It was a natural thing that he would be in charge. But he never really had
much background in hydrology, and he wasn't really interested in it either. He didn't
really want to be involved in hydrology, and he just pretty much let me do my thing and
he did his thing. Even though he was the branch chief at that time, he didn't really give
me much direction other than administrative type things.
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