Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
maximum flood. Although the SCS said they were designing theirs for the probable
maximum flood, they didn't have any freeboard. So they could build a project cheaper
than the Corps could because they didn't have that extra 3-5 feet of freeboard on the top,
which is quite an additional expense. So they might be able to design and build a project
cheaper than the Corps could with a little less design criteria.
That was probably one of the biggest areas of contention. We were having the same
problem as I had told you last time with the Bureau about their analysis for a probable
maximum flood--coming up with a smaller flood than the Corps. So that through the
years was a big problem, but we got that straightened out.
When we went into the dam safety of non-Federal dams [program], all of the dams that
the SCS build, or practically all of them, there are a few but most all of them, they turn
them over to a local interest. Some conservation district or something that takes care of
them and operates them after the SCS builds them.
So they were all non-Federal dams in a sense. They all had to be investigated by the
Corps. When the Corps looked at them, they said, "They re not up to the normal design
standards. If they don't have freeboard on them, that was our first approach to it. Rather
than have all of these SCS projects come under the blanket of disapproval because they
didn't have any freeboard on them, we finally compromised with the SCS and said, "Well,
we'll argue that since your dams are small that you don't need freeboard as bad as the
Corps does on its projects. It wasn't a very good justification but otherwise all of them
would have had to be listed as not being up to par. We didn't want to make the SCS look
bad.
So they just politically agreed that as long as they were designed for the probable
maximum flood, even if they didn't have freeboard on them, we would accept them as
being up to standard.
Q ..
Did that kind of criticism lead them to make any changes in their design criteria?
A ..
Not the SCS, no.
Q ..
Still no freeboard?
A
Well, they have a different concept of design. They have a design flood that takes care
of the flood storage. Then they have what they call the spillway flood or something like
that. It's the probable maximum flood, and they make their spillway big enough so that
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