Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
how a person like Jake Douma used the committee. Would you like to go back and
discuss that again and how technical experts like yourself saw those committees assisting
your work?
Well, it kind of took the place of the normal engineering manuals, which take a long time
A
to evolve and finally get written. Not only does it take a lot of money to get all the
expertise you need to put together a manual, it just seems like it takes forever to complete
the dam things. One of the ways, especially the hydraulics people, got around that slow,
burdensome job of getting a manual written was to set up these technical
like
channel stabilization and some others, too.
They got together the people that they knew in the field offices that had good expertise in
the area, and they'd get them assigned to the committees. Then, before they met, they
would send out a notice to district offices about when they were going to meet and ask for
subjects and information on problems in that particular area. Then people would be
invited if they had a problem, even though they weren't a member of the committee. They
could come and make a presentation on one of their problems.
The committee would then review what the problem was and make comments on it. They
may do some extended study on it and actually come up with some documented solutions
to the problem so that the committee notes then formed a basis for technical documents for
use by the different districts even though they weren't an official engineering manual.
Most of the experts, anybody doing channel stabilization, would collect the notes from
those committee meetings and use those as a source of assistance and help in doing their
channel stabilization work. So it was a way to get the most out of your limited number
of experts.
They would invite people from other organizations sometimes to participate. They would
hire consultants to help them out, to work on doing a special job for them. They would
review what the consultants had done and add their bits to it until they finally got a good
document on whatever subject they were working on. So it was and still is a good tool.
Q ..
Now you said that was a convenient way, too, of offsetting manpower shortages or
technical skill shortages at OCE.
A
Well, that's true because there were very few people in a lot of the disciplines, as I
indicated before. The hydraulics people do not have much more staff now than they did
then. One person for navigation, which is a big subject; another person for coastal work;
and another one for the hydraulic design. Each one of those subjects is pretty tremendous
by itself.
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