Vernon
Q ..
Well, what about some of these dams
Missouri. What happens if they fill up?
What are you going to do with those?
A ..
You're not going to worry about those filling up.
Q ..
You don't worry about that?
A ..
Those major ones on the Missouri River, those are big suckers.
Q ..
You've got a couple thousand years of storage there, then?
A ..
Yes, you've got lots of storage on those. Those will be some of the last ones to fill up,
even though there is a lot of sediment. But you see, there are a whole lot of them, a lot
of reservoirs there. The ones farthest upstream, they get a lot of the sediment. The ones
downstream then are the ones that get the sediment flowing in from the tributaries. But
they all don't get the main sediment from the Missouri River.
Garrison Dam and Fort Peck both have a lot of storage, an awful lot of storage in them.
They collect a lot of the sediment.
Q ..
What about a river like the Delaware, which has really got terrible problems with
pollution? Do you get involved in that kind of thing?
A
The Corps doesn`t really get involved except in whatever they`re doing to help EPA. At
one time water quality was a project purpose. You could estimate, well you kind of
assumed, that whatever you spent for storage for water quality you could recapture in
benefits. You didn't have a good way of estimating the benefits that derived from it, but
it was kind of like water supply. You figured that if anybody wanted it and was willing
to pay for it, why it was worth the money it cost.
But for a while there we were able to add water quality to projects and give some gross
estimate of what the benefits would be by diluting the downstream water. People would
be dumping effluent into the stream, and by putting better water in it from the reservoir,
then you would reduce the contamination of the river downstream.
Some rivers may not have any oxygen in them, for example, or very little oxygen. If you
put in water from a reservoir that has lot of oxygen in it, then the fish can survive and
Previous Page
