Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
What it's supposed to handle is peak flow, annual peak flows, for example, on a river at
a particular gauging station. But these peak flows are supposed to be unaffected by man.
No reservoirs in the watershed, no diversion projects, no ice jams, or anything like that.
If you take the data published by the GS [USGS] in their annual reports and just plug it
into the PC program, we can get a nice answer. The GS has arrangements, codes in there,
that will tell you if the data is affected by something, if there is a reservoir upstream or
something like that. But if people don't pay any attention to that, just use the data that is
published, they can get some pretty bad answers.
They need to go back in and look at any of those answers or any of those floods that have
been impacted by ice jam or by regulation of a reservoir or something like that, to be sure
that they're using homogenous data. Not many people do that if they are not trained in
the discipline. They don't realize they even have to do that. So that's where you can get
into trouble with computers--even though I really didn't get into doing the actual computer
work myself until after I retired from the Corps. I never had time to do computer
analysis. It takes so much time.
I used to get after some of our reviewers out in the division offices because they got so
enamored with computerizing and doing their own types of programming that they would
forget about the fact that they were supposed to be reviewing the district reports. Not
doing the work themselves but actually reviewing them and telling the district what they
needed to revise and do over.
That's a tendency for people who get started to use computers, to get fascinated by them
and addicted to them, and they forget all about doing anything else.
Q ..
Gee, if it can do this, maybe it could do that.
A
Oh yes, it's a great tool for "what ifs". You say, "Well, this is a good answer maybe, but
what if I did this, maybe I'll get a better answer." You have a hard time quitting.
We had a guy in hydraulics back in Garrison who wanted to keep improving on his answer
all the time. We could never get him to stop studying. He worked on the
level that
I did at the time. But I use to tell him, I'd say, "Adolph, you've got this answer so close
now how can you worry about getting any closer You know that, or your answer isn't
any better than that. "Yes, but if I improve this channel a little bit here I could probably
get the water surface another hundredth of a foot lower. I said, "Well, Adolph you don't
need to do that, it's not that important. Forget it and move on to another project.
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