Vernon
Q ..
They become a source of confusion more than anything else then?
A
Well, sure, and then they start throwing in economic analysis with those rare risks. When
you start thinking about that, the dam fails and 10,000 people are drowned, what is their
life worth? How do you go about deciding what an average life is worth? Besides that,
who are those people going to be? The ones living right downstream from the dam, it's
not something like an airplane where you don't know the victim, a victim in an airplane
could be anybody. Anybody that flies airplanes. But the people--right downstream from
a dam--don't want the dam design based on a benefit/cost ratio. They want it safe.
Safety Problems
Q ..
Maximum safety?
A ..
So anyway, you run into those kinds of problems and justifiably so because there are only
so many dollars to go around and you can't spend all the dollars on dam safety, you've got
to spend dollars on welfare--all kinds of other things. So there's always going to be this
debate on the best way to spend your money.
Q ..
When you were doing these dam safety studies and investigations, what impressions did
you have, based on your studies, of the people who designed these dams? I mean the
Corps has a reputation for being extremely conservative in it's design philosophies. You
said some of these dams didn't even take into account the probable
flood.
A
Well, either they didn't take [it] into account or they made a reduced version of it. The
Bureau of Reclamation had that problem. Of course, for many years they had a different
procedure for justifying their projects and paybacks on their projects. Irrigation and
hydropower, those are project benefits that have to be repaid by the beneficiaries.
The people that are getting the power have to pay for it. The people who are getting the
irrigation water -have to pay for that. So they have to have somebody to pay for them.
Therefore, whoever pays has to pay for this extra safety. It goes along with the project--
having to pay for that extra safety.
To get projects that were acceptable to the beneficiaries, they had to try to be as low cost
as they could. Otherwise, they wouldn't get anybody to pay for their projects. So they
kind of went overboard in cutting down on the size of their design floods, arguing that,
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