Vernon
Q ..
You're sort of fighting human nature in that area, I'd say.
A ..
Oh yes, you really are because a person [who] has some training in the area, he feels like
he knows as much about it as the other person or he thinks he does, why should he go to
him for help. He says, can do this myself. Well, not only that, I don't have to wait
for it. If I call up the head of hydrology and ask him to do this study for me, he'll tell me,
"Well, we'll put you in line. You'll get your study done three months from now," or
something like that, and he wants it right now. So he says, "Well, I'll do it myself then."
Q ..
Get it done with?
A ..
Well, that happens a lot.
Q ..
When the H&H Branches or Sections were pretty fully developed in all the districts and
divisions, about how many people did you have? Were you monitoring their professional
development program in the career program?
A ..
Well, off hand it's a tough--there were so many--we had some surveys but I can't
remember the numbers right off hand. Well, some of the offices had a pretty good staff
and some of them a real small staff. But we had, how many district offices did we have?
Q ..
You had about 40 or so districts out there at that time.
A
About 40 districts. Well, just a rough guess of people in hydrology, there would have to
be at least 200 of them or more. But from small offices, some offices only had a couple
of people because they didn't do much. Others had big staffs and especially down in the
southwest for awhile when they were building all those dams.
Then when you consider all the other people that work in hydraulic design and hydraulics
and water control management and all that, numbers get a lot bigger than that. But just
pure and simple hydrology, probably as a minimum, 200. That would be just a rough
guess because I don't remember the numbers--we had to do that once in a while but the
figures don't stick in my mind.
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