Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
year any of the field offices, if they had an idea on a research project, would submit it to
whatever element of research was responsible for it.
If it happened to be an H&H topic, why they'd send it to us. Then we would review and
decide if that was a good topic. If it was a good topic, what kind of priority should it
have? How would it fit in with the others? Based on all these submittals and sometimes
there were quite a few of them, that would help us decide on what the research program
would be.
Somebody from a field office was having problems with it, and they needed to get it
solved. They didn't have any way of getting it solved. So let's have a research project
and figure out how to do this here and who should do it. Then, the subject might come
in to H&H and then we would decide, "Well, does this belong in HEC or does it belong
in the Waterways Experiment Station?
So we would take the topic and send it out to the lab that we thought knew the most about
it and could do the best job of it and tell them to submit a proposal on it telling us what
they were going to do and how much they were going to spend and how long it was going
to take it and what kind of results they expected to get. Then -we would look at it and
decide whether it was a viable topic to put in the research program.
That's how a lot of the research projects came about. But a lot of them were brought
about by the people from research themselves, who had a good handle on what things
really needed to have more work done on them or new work done.
Q ..
Now were you able to maintain a fairly level amount of funding for research and
development in hydrology while you were there or were there great fluctuations?
A ..
No, there wasn't a lot of fluctuation. As a matter of fact, it's kind of like a moving train.
When you get moving, why it's pretty hard to stop it. I mean you get the program built
up, and you're halfway through projects or three quarters of the way through projects, and
you can't very well stop those research projects after you've spent three quarters of the
money on them. You've got to keep going on them.
So you've kind of got several projects going that are part way through, and you've got
new ones coming on and others dropping off so it's a continuing process like that. But
there are new ones coming on, old ones falling off, and others in the middle.
Usually, historically, what you've received in the past is a guide as to whether you should
have a similar level in the future or not--to have new things that need researching. Hardly
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