Vernon
Engineering not only needed the hydrology, but they needed the hydraulics and hydraulic
design to go along with all the engineering studies that were being conducted. They had
to have hydrology and hydraulics.
Then when you got over into the operations, the people who did the physical movement
of the gates and so forth, they didn't really have any background on why they should
change those gates and so forth, other than people would complain about what they were
doing. But they got their direction from hydrology and hydraulics people who had the
experience in doing all the studies to decide how you needed to operate those gates.
It was like serving three basic elements of the Corps. Yet you had to put them someplace?
and where do you put them? It started off traditionally because they were in engineering
to begin with and so was planning and everything. It was harder to take them out of
engineering and put them in one other area when they were already in engineering. O f
course, no division chief wants to lose any of his branches because he'll lose part of his
responsibility and probably some of the justification for his own position.
It always was a constant problem
trying to decide who would handle that one. Let's
see, it was the Los Angeles District. They even moved the people who were doing the
water control management into the Operations Division. They took them out of the
Hydrology and Hydraulics and put them in the Operations Division.
A fellow by the name of Tatum--you probably heard of him, I don't know He has a
things
hydraulic model, a routing procedure, named after him. He's done some indiv
But
in terms of hydrology and hydraulics. Very active out in the Los Angeles D
they wanted the
because it was important out there in operating some of those
guy that knew the most about it, right in the Operations Division.
It worked. We didn't like it when they did that because it started fragmenting the
capabilities of the discipline. I always thought that it would have been better to have
hydrology and hydraulics in a separate group, so that they weren't directly under Chiefs
of Planning or Chiefs of Engineering or Operations, any of them. Then they could
provide a service for all of them and be impartial because when you`re under one, it is
very difficult to be impartial because your boss makes it almost impossible for you to be
impartial.
It's like a special staff office then?
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