Vernon
long and then by the time that permit expires, you have to have started your design and
proceeding on to actually construct it.
By the end of that permit if you haven't done certain things, why then you can't keep your
permit. It goes up for grabs for somebody else. Even the projects that have permits,
they're only good for 50 years. There are a lot of these old Federal Power Commission
permits that were issued 50 years ago. They're coming up nowadays for renewal. Just
because you built the dam in the first place, doesn't mean you're going to get a renewal
of your permit. The Federal Power Commission can give that project to somebody else
if they want to. Not likely to, but they could.
Office of Research and Development
Q ..
me change a little bit and ask you something about the establishment of the Office of
Research and Development in the Corps. That's a relative newcomer. How did that affect
the work that you were doing, especially the work you may have done with the Hydraulic
Engineering Center?
A
Well, it became another layer, another management layer. Of course, the whole idea was
to more efficiently manage the labs, the Corps labs, to have this office in the headquarters
so that they could keep somebody who was spending full-time keeping track of all this
stuff and trying to decide where the money should go and all that sort of thing.
But, by and large, there still was an awful lot of input --most of the input had to be done
by the professionals who were most familiar with a particular type of research, like
hydraulic design. Even though some of the people in the Office of Research and
Development were a little bit familiar with what was going on, they didn't really know
enough of the technical details to know whether certain types of research were worthwhile
or not.
They had to depend on the monitors from each of the disciplines up in the Chief's office
and from field offices. When they had these, they'd have R&D, oh what do they call
them. Well, anyway, they'd have a--for various parts of the research effort--they'd have
a get together each year and go over all the proposed research projects by the Hydraulics
Lab, the Cold Regions Lab.
HEC would have an annual review and someone from the Office of Research and
Development would be at that. HEC would, for example, lay out the program of all the
kind of money they wanted and the projects they wanted to do. I would go to those
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