Vernon
The SCS is confined to small rural watersheds. Obviously, they re not the Federal
Engineer. FEMA, they look to us for their technical expertise and engineering. They
couldn't be considered. Who else could be the Federal Engineer but us. I mean they
could present a pretty good case for it. Now, I don't know whether they can do that so
much anymore because they're not building the big projects, or at least not as many as
they use to.
Hydropower --the Bureau has done a lot of that, but the Corps has done a lot more when
you get around looking all over the country. That was a pretty active area for awhile
there, when they were trying to add hydropower to all the existing projects, where private
[owners] could come in and get a right to develop the power at various Federal sites.
Some of these companies went in and grabbed up the rights for all kinds of projects,
whether there was any possibility of getting power there or not, just to be sure, just in
case. Of course, they lost them after awhile because they were limited in how long they
could take to develop the site. But some of them went out and grabbed up a whole lot of
the Corps' projects, even the locks and dams, some of them didn't have much head at all.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Q ..
I know during the energy crisis there was a lot of talk of that and then in the early
there was a lot of talk about hydro.
A ..
We were fairly active in that program. In hydrology and hydraulics, we had hydropower
as one of the things that we were involved in. We dealt with the Federal Hydropower
Administration or
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission--can't even remember
the names of the agencies.
Q ..
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Yes, the Regulatory Commission. Whenever there was a big private hydropower dam
A
going in some place, they always got the Corps to do the hydrology and hydraulics
connected with building that project and see what impacts it was going to have on floods
downstream. In some cases, they had to add storage to their projects to take care of the
increase in flow they were going to cause if they didn't have some storage. Our people
in hydraulics and hydrology would do that assessment.
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