Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
A:
That's right. I was interested in going to either the TVA or WES because I knew what
they were doing. The professors told me what kind of work they were doing there, model
testing, various kinds of water-oriented projects. I thought those would be good places
to learn on the job. WES paid me more than the TVA would, so I decided to go to
WES
I found out later that WES was a better place to go than TVA. It had a much bigger
laboratory, and it did different kinds of work. TVA only did one kind of model testing,
mainly dams, because they were building dams for power. WES had all sorts of model
tests for dams, river channels, coastal engineering works, and tidal waterways.
When you first went to WES, you said that you were a gauge reader pro-tern.
A:
They had a big outdoor model of the lower Mississippi River. He [Lt. Falkner]] assigned
me the task of reading water level gauges on a model of the Mississippi River. The model
was about 300 feet long, representing about 600 miles of the lower Mississippi River.
They were making studies to determine how high the levees should be to carry a large
design flood. The model was constructed to a distorted scale of about one to fifty feet
vertically and one foot to one mile horizontally. Water levels were measured along the
model for different size floods. By scaling the model measurements up to prototype
levels, it was possible to determine the levee heights required along the river to contain
the design flood.
My first job at WES was to read water level gauges along the model river. There were
about 25 gauges that had to be read about every five minutes. There were about six gauge
readers, each sitting at separate point gauges along the model. As the river flow changed
we had to read the point gauge and record the water level about every five minutes.
It was just a very simple thing to do, but this was in July when the temperature is hot
in Mississippi. I thought, "Any grammar school kid could do this. I don't know why a
college graduate needs to waste his time doing this. So I went back to Joe Johnson and
told him that I would certainly like to get into something that requires a little more effort
than sitting there and reading that gauge. So, after a couple of weeks, I got assigned to
another job working on model tests of dam spillways and outlet works that was more
interesting and challenging. But it was good training, and it didn't last very long.
Wasn't that model one of the first of its kind used in the United States--one that actually
tried to scale the lower part of the Mississippi River?
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