Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
But they went to them and asked them, "Hey, don't you think it will be good if somebody
really analyzed a watershed, the whole watershed, to
out what you can do to manage
the water quality and make sure that it doesn't get bad by storage in reservoirs or by
pollutants, sort of look at the whole thing and not just one piece at a time." Well hell, all
the people said, "Yes." Every one of them said, "Yeah, that would be great."
Well, the
went ahead and went to Congress and said, "Hey, we got a mandate to go
ahead and do this sort of thing." But they never even mentioned to the Federal committee
that they wanted to do this sort of thing. So, somehow they got money assigned to do this
sort of analysis.
The
I found out about it was I got calls from people in the Corps field offices asking
me what these guys in the GS were doing coming in and asking about reservoir operation
rules and talking about modifying the water control management plans of the Corps. I
said, "I don't even know what the hell is going on. That's the
I found out about it.
They would go to our offices and find out how the reservoirs were being regulated.
Then they were going to take those water control plans and see what they could do to
modify them to improve water quality. They went out and hired a bunch of experts,
people from universities, who were really smart guys with this sort of studies. They had
this whole program going. It was on the Willamette
[in Oregon], I think, their first
study.
But, anyway, when I found out about that I about blew my gasket. Here are these people
out there going to tell us how we're going to regulate our reservoirs, and they haven't
even talked to me about it or even told me they were going to interview our people. The
next time we had a meeting, I got all over them about them. They said, "Oh, no, we
thought you knew all about it. How were we suppose to know?
But they never apologized or anything, they just went on their merry way and they went
on and did other watersheds. Well, obviously, after you've assembled a group of experts
like that, hired them and trained them to do the kind of work you want done, you're going
to
more work for them or fire them all. So it was obvious that they went ahead and
did more studies. But I would have rather seen that money gone to data collection.
I'm not arguing that what they did weren't good studies. It was just that I don't think they
would have gotten a vote of confidence from the Federal committee that they got from a
non-Federal committee. Because the other Federal committees would say, "Yes, it would
be good to do that but it ought to be an interagency effort, not a USGS effort, and use the
capabilities of the other Federal agencies, particularly reservoir reservation like the Corps'
projects and the Bureau's projects.
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