JACOB H. DOUMA
Jacob ("Jake") H. Douma concluded a long and distinguished career in the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers when he retired on January 12, 1979. His retirement merely marked the
formal end of his civilian service with the Corps of Engineers after more than 41 years. He
continued on at
tilt for another 12 years, until 1991, before he finally decided to halt his active
consulting career. Thus ended his 61 years of active involvement in engineering and hydraulics
that had begun with his enrollment in the College of Engineering at the University of California
at Berkeley in 1930.
Born in Hanford, California, on May 30, 1912, Jake Douma's interest in civil engineering
and hydraulics was sparked by his summer job of irrigating alfalfa fields. As he toiled in the
fields, young Jake kept thinking "there must be a better way to irrigate
His thoughts about
irrigation led him to read about the Bureau of Reclamation and the Central California Project.
He decided that to learn the better ways of irrigating he had to get an engineering education. So
off he went to study engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, then one of the
preeminent schools of engineering in the country. After five years at the University, where he
studied under Morrough P. O'Brien and Bernard Etchevary, he graduated with the Bachelor of
Science in Civil Engineering and majors in hydraulics and irrigation.
After graduation, he accepted a position at the US. Army Corps of Engineers Waterway
Experiment Station
at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the summer of 1935. There he worked
on the Mississippi River Model and did model research on
Dam, New Mexico, before
moving to the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado, in 1936. Jake Douma soon tired of
the routine of tabulating rainfall and runoff records to determine flow hydrographs in the Project
Investigation Branch and maneuvered himself into a position working for Jacob E.
in
the Bureau's Hydraulic Laboratory in Denver. Here he became familiar with the Bureau's
hydraulic model studies and design standards for dams, canals, and irrigation structures and came
to know many of the leading hydraulic engineers in the country.
In 1939, Jake Douma joined the Los Angeles Engineer District as a hydraulic engineer in
the Hydraulic Design Section of the Hydraulics Branch of the Engineering Division. Before he
even settled himself, he was off to the Nashville Engineer District for a short, three-month
assignment as a hydraulic designer on the Wolf Creek Dam project. Soon back in the LA
District, he rose to be Chief, Hydraulic Design Section, and was responsible for hydraulic model
testing and design of high-velocity flood channels, flood and debris dams, and appurtenant
hydraulic works in the Los Angeles area. He did pioneering work on the Tujunga Wash channel
for which he developed the design criteria for spiral, super-elevated, high-velocity flood channels.
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