Anyway, that's a little of the background on some of the problems we had with FEMA and
the insurance prograrn. Another agency that had a lot of dealings with the Corps was the
USGS. The USGS used to, and still does, do an awful lot of the stream gauging that the
Corps paid for. That got to be a little bit of a controversy for awhile there because, as I
mentioned, the GS is very eager to promote themselves as being something, not just a data
collection agency, but as a source of technical knowledge, of all types of technical
knowledge.
Through the years, I served on the Inter-agency Advisory committee for the USGS, this
was supposed to be an independent committee that gave advice to the USGS on what the
other agencies thought they should be doing. There are Federal laws that established the
USGS and what their role was going to be.
Our position in the Corps was, "Well, your primary goal was data collection as far as
we're concerned. So we would like to see you spend as much money as possible on data
collection because there is not enough money to go around to do all the data collection that
needs to be done. The GS was trying to get away from this role of being strictly data
collection and wanted to have a lot of good technical experts on their staff that did studies
as well as just collect data. So they gradually started getting various expertise.
Ground
Studies and the United States Geological Service (USGS)
Now, one area that I felt very strongly needed expertise was ground water because nobody
else was doing it. One area where the Corps did very little work, primarily because we
weren't involved in the water supply too much--only so far as reservoirs are involved. So
we didn't do a lot of ground water studies. When we needed to know something about
ground water, we wanted somebody else to be able to provide that guidance to us. The
GS did that through the years. They developed their ground water expertise. Nobody
seemed to have any difficulty with that.
A lot of the private communities needed data like that in trying to decide where they were
going to get their water supply, ground water, or if there wasn't any ground water, then
they would have to go to a surface water source. But they were able to get information
from GS on available ground water, yield, and all so forth.
Periodically I'd get requests from the GS asking me what kind of technical expertise would
you like us to be doing work on so that we can help the other agencies with our technical
expertise I'd write back and tell them, "You don't need to do any technical work in
surface water. We'll do that ourselves. You just keep the data coming, and we'll do our
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