Vernon
That helps keep the work load distributed around the Corps. One district has too much,
why they can use other districts. Of course, they use consulting firms a lot, too. They
use consulting
more now than going to another district I think. But at that time they
were encouraged to go to another district rather than go to engineering firms outside the
government.
Q ..
Is that primarily because of the lack of manpower across the agency?
A
Well, that was a lot of it. But a lot of it was that they didn't have too much confidence,
especially in the hydrology and hydraulics area, in some of the private engineeringfirms.
But, nowadays, they are a lot more competent than they used to be in that particular area.
Most of them hadn't done enough work in that area to really say they were experts at it.
I don't know--with the small number of dams that the Corps is designing nowadays, it
won't be too long before they won't have any experts on how to design dams. Then
they'll have to go to private industry because a lot of the private firms get the experience
in foreign countries designing projects for another country or for the World Bank.
Q ..
That still wouldn't affect the hydrologists as much would it? Because they still have a lot
of the other things they have to do-flood control, etc.
A
Well it wasn't so apt to impact those as some of the people like the structural designers
especially. It's a tough thing when you're running out of big projects to design. You have
these people with all this expertise, what do you do with them? You have to retrain them
or do something. They can't just sit there twiddling their thumbs so you want to keep
them because you might get another job to design. But that can only go on for so long and
then pretty soon you lose your experts. They go off somewhere else and get a job.
So it's been tough through the years to maintain the kind of capability you'd like to have
in each district office. Some of the divisions have tried to use one of their districts--they'll
say, "We'll make one of our districts the prominent experts in that area, and we'll move
the best people we have from the other districts to that particular district. And then they
will help all the other districts so that you don't have to try to maintain a full staff in each
district.
Q ..
Has that worked relatively well?
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