There's no such thing as actually equal mitigation because the plant life or the animal and
the fish life that you disrupted may not be duplicated. You may not be able to actually
duplicate it, but you may be able to put some other type of fish or plant back in service
in an area that didn't have it before to mitigate.
Q ..
But your work in hydrology would have been relatively unchanged by, I mean, you would
have been doing the same things?
A ..
Well, hydrology, of course, got involved in where the wetlands wereand what constitutes
wetlands, where are they and how much water is needed to create a wetland.
Q ..
Oh, so you were right in the middle of it?
Well, trying to decide where on the rivers is the normal ordinary high waterline, for
A
example. Along the river, how do you go about determining where the ordinary high
waterline is? Everything below the ordinary high waterline, it really belongs to nature.
Once you establish the
high waterline, anything below that is not really a wetland
because that's the predominant level of the water.
There are different methods of how you determine that ordinary high water level. One of
them I call a physical fact method, where you go out in a boat up and down the river and
take photographs and then examine changes in vegetation along the bank. You can almost
tell by observation where the vegetation changes, that is--lower vegetation has more water
supply than the upper part. That is a pretty good way of determining what the ordinary
high waterline is.
Then you can establish by hydraulic computations what flow it takes to get up to that
profile at that particular water or line on the bank. Then you can analyze that flow and
say, "Well, what is the frequency in that flow. You can also carry that same flow onto
other streams where you may not have as good of vegetation line to tell you what is
happening. So that there is a lot of hydrology and hydraulics involved in deciding what
are wetlands and what are not wetlands.
Then there was, of course, a big hassle in the beginning between the Corps and the EPA
because, well, it wasn't EPA at that time, the Water Pollution Control Administration, I
think. But, anyway, the earlier studies on environmental impacts where the Corps wasn't
as enthusiastic as the environmental people were about being hard-nosed. The Corps
thought the environmental people were being too demanding.
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