Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
They helped others like myself by paying for the tuition for the courses in the evenings.
You still went to work all the time, but your did your work on your own. But if they paid
the tuition, then that was good help.
Q ..
Now that kind of thing is critical to the development of your people--to have training
courses and that outside base of expertise. It also provided you with consultants, didn't
it?
Oh yes. One of the key cornerstones of HEC, when it was founded, was the training
A
aspect of it because, just like you were talking, there were limited resources available then
and we wanted to be sure that people were trained and trained fairly consistently. If you
have everybody trained in different offices, they've got a little different outlook on how
the profession should be conducted or performed.
Another problem that used to give us real headaches was when some discipline within an
organization would do hydrology and hydraulic studies without coordinating with the
actual Hydrology and Hydraulics Branch. For example, a lot of times we would run into
people doing relocation work. The people doing relocation work would think they had to
do all the studies in-house.
They would do the geotech work, the hydrology and hydraulics, the structures, everything
that they needed to do they'd try to do in-house in their own little branch. They wouldn't
go out and get the assistance they should have. Sometimes they would be using antiquated
things that were no longer in use. When all they had to do is walk down the hall and get
all the help they needed. They just didn't seem to want to do that.
I was always concerned about the people that would do that. Planners doing their own
hydrology. That bothered me, too. I wanted--at least when I got to be in a position where
I had a little bit of control over what went on--to be sure that whenever there were any
hydrology studies done, at least they would be coordinated with the main hydrology and
hydraulics group.
I don't know that that was always done. But some of the people--well, like I mentioned
before, a person trained in hydrology would transfer over to the planning division. He'd
figure he knew as much or more about hydrology than the guy in the Hydrology
Department, so he'd do his own hydrology. But things might have changed since he was
in the hydrology business, so he may be a little obsolete in what he was doing and he
wouldn't know it, if he started to do it on his own. I guess that's true in other disciplines.
You see the same kind of thing happening.
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