Vernon
A
Well, the same way with the Secretary's office when it come to dam safety. They wanted
some sort of a formula that they could turn down repairs on a dam. They wouldn't turn
down repairs on a dam without all kinds of studies. Not only that but they wanted to keep
the studies going and going and going to delay decisions but it still ended up where they
had to make a decision.
The Secretary's office never wanted to be in a position of saying that they turned down
repairs on, or rehabilitation of a dam for dam safety. If they turned it down and the thing
failed, look where they would be. So they never wanted to be in that position. So they
always had you restudying it or trying to come up with some special criteria that would
get them off the hook. You know saying that here is a new criteria for evaluating dam
safety and it meets that, the dam meets the criteria so we don't have to do anything to it.
You know that would frustrate me a little bit when they would do that sort of thing.
When it came to which dams they would put some money in fixing them, they would pick
the one that cost the least amount of money, not the one that needed it the most. All that
used to aggravate me. They would pick a dam which I thought should have been way on
the bottom of the priority because it wasn't going to cost as much to fix that one. But then
they looked better because they were fixing some of them.
Q ..
Well, how did that settle with the Congressional people who were interested in this kind
of thing because it's a very high visibility safety issue to the general public, especially
after all those problems they had in the late
A ..
of the things that is pretty obvious are the structural features of a dam. If something
becomes obvious structurally that it's got a crack in the concrete that is a serious crack or
it's got a seepage problem, really a severe seepage problem and something might happen,
the whole dam might go out or something like
you didn't have too much trouble
getting money to fix that. That type of a fix, and they call that rehabilitation, they didn't
call that dam safety because they could identify an exact physical problem and so they got
money for that without too much problem.
But when they got into things like the probable maximum flood? the present day estimate
of the probable maximum flood, if it was bigger than the one that they used to design it
with originally or maybe they didn't even use the probable maximum flood originally,
would that dam withstand the present day probable maximum flood, and in a lot of cases
they wouldn't.
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