Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
WES got involved in a lot of that work in trying to design the right kind of gates and so
forth.
Q ..
Would experience working on that river, the Corps' experience working on that river,
have alerted you a long time ago to these problems. I mean, if the work was done on the
Arkansas River and the whole system out there, would they have known from the 19th
century, the early investigations and surveys that were done, that this was a problem or
was that something that just came about recently?
Oh no, they knew about the sediment problem. They've known about it, but what to do
A
about it--that is, if you could do anything about it. How to design the projects, how much
extra storage do you need in these projects if you're going to make them functional for a
long period of time. How much of that sediment is going to stay in the reservoirs and how
much of it is going to move on through. Trying to design for that sort of thing is a tough
thing to do because the people didn't know enough about it. So they come up with a lot
of new technology.
Q ..
Was that sediment problem repeated in any other major river basins?
A
Well, the Missouri River has a lot of sediment problems. Oh, what's the name of the
community there. They had to relocate a whole
. Oh, Niobrara [Nebraska],
that whole community practically had to be relocated because of the sediment accumulation
in the headwaters of the reservoir. I forget which reservoir it was, it was one of the
mainstream reservoirs [Gavins Point].
As the water flows into the flat pool, it spreads out and slows down, and the faster the
water is flowing the more sediment it can carry. When it slows down, it drops the
sediment. It was dropping it right there at the headwaters of the reservoir. So as it built
up, it just starts getting built up higher and higher, and so it couldn't pass flow there
without getting pretty high. When the flow did come in, then it would flood out the
up in that area. The sediment was actually restricting the flow in the
Niobrara River.
So they ended up relocating that whole
as a mitigation measure for the project.
But they hadn't planned on it, originally they didn't have that in mind. But as it become
more and more prominent, why they saw they were going to have to do something about
it, and they finally did [relocation completed in
Previous Page
