Vernon
They'd tell the Chief of Hydrology to go and change his study. He may not be an expert
in hydrology at all, but because he thought the answer was too big, he'd say that we can't
afford that kind of an answer. I know that happened at least in a couple of cases where
we have a design flood, called the standard project flood in the Corps of Engineers.
In one of the offices I worked in the Chief of Hydrology came up with the standard project
flood based on his best estimates of all the components that go into it. He sent it forward
to the Chief of Engineering, and the Chief of Engineering looked at it and he says,
"What's the biggest flood you ever had there?" Well, it was only about a quarter of the
size of the standard project flood. He says, "Oh, that's way too big." You go back and
cut that thing down considerable, he says, "That's way too big. It's going to cost us too
much money to design for that.
So the hydrology group was busy redoing it trying to cut the parameters here and there
and everywhere to make the final result less. While they were doing that, along comes
the biggest storm they've ever had, that was almost as big as the standard project flood
that they had already presented. So the Chief of Engineering immediately says, "Cancel
my order. But you see that can happen. If they are not kind of an independent group,
they get those political pressures.
For example, if a project has a close B:C ratio, it won`t quite make 1: 1 ratio, why they
may get pressure to move their pencil in the direction that gets more benefits. They have
to have the choice of doing the best job they can without having somebody trying to alter
their answer for them.
One of the reasons that the Corps paid money to the Weather Service, National Weather
Service, to do the extreme rainfall analysis for probable maximum floods was because we
didn't want the people in the Corps to be pressured by district engineers or chiefs of
engineering divisions or planning divisions or whoever when coming up with their best
estimate of the probable maximum precipitation.
They were able to work independently without regard to economics of projects--to work
independently strictly on the technical, meteorological aspects of the estimates. It's good
to have that freedom, not to have somebody pushing you for a high answer or a low
answer. So, I guess, that's one of the things that the Chief's office really ought to
continue to give those people at least enough independence so that they don't have that
pressure on them all the time.
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