Vernon
The Fort
and
But, anyway, it's been interesting, I think. I've never really been bored in any of the time
I've been working in it. Even today we run into new problems and trying to figure out
how to do things. We've got a tough one right now we're working on with the Fort
Worth District, trying to do the right kind of hydrology for a river basin down there which
has some apparent large losses, which the district is having a hard time recognizing.
We're having a hard time trying to decide what they should be because we don't know
enough about the local area except we do know there are major problems with trying to
get a good frequency analysis down there.
Q ..
What do you mean by major apparent large losses? Is it water?
A
It's the water. There are some streams where there are underground canyons, like almost
where a lot of the water will disappear from the river and then reappear later on
downstream. So there is an underground channel there someplace, flowing underground,
and these can be large quantities of water in some places. But this one we don't know
enough about to know what it is. Nobody has really got into it to check it out in great
detail or anything.
But we see by looking at the historical flow at the gauge upstream and then we look
downstream and there hasn't been enough *rain to cause an increase in flow. Yet the flow
downstream from this station is much greater than this one. Where is the water coming
from? Well, there was a lot of flow up here. It seemed to disappear when it got here and
then reappear down here. Trying to figure out just how much it's going to be under
different circumstances and that sort of thing when you don't have much to work with,
you're doing a lot of guesswork. You're trying to develop a model that will show this
stream up here with a lot of water and then less water here and then more water back
down here, and it doesn't follow your normal run-off procedures, where so much rain falls
on the land and you estimate the losses and then you make a hydrograph out of it. You
have procedures for doing all that. But you don't really have good procedures when the
water disappears and comes back in.
Q ..
Now what river is this?
A
This is the Ciblo River down in Texas. But it's an interesting study, and Fort Worth
District wants to approach it one way and we think that maybe they ought to try another
way. We're trying to get them to do a little more than they want to do. It costs money
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