Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
What other studies did you do when you were at WES? Did you basically stay on dams?
A:
Mostly, yes. I was there only one year, and after working two or three months up on the
Mississippi River Basin model reading gauges, then I worked on dam models for nine
months before I transferred to the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado.
Bureau of Reclamation
I stayed [at WES] one year during which time I took a Federal junior engineer exam and
passed it with a pretty good grade. I got three job offers, one from the Bureau of
Reclamation, one from Brownsville District of the Corps of Engineers, and one from the
Savannah District of the Corps of Engineers. The junior engineer grade paid
a year, and I thought, boy, that's a real big increase, from 0.00 to 7.00 a month.
The Bureau of Reclamation paid
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.00, but the districts only paidWell,
that didn't make it too hard to decide to go to the Bureau of Reclamation.
So I did, and went out to Denver, Colorado, where they assigned me to the Project
Investigations Branch where they studied the feasibility of constructing projects to produce
more power or irrigation water. The Bureau was not as flood control oriented as the
Corps. I remember that after a feasibility study was authorized I had to take rainfall and
runoff records and produce flow hydrographs to determine what large floods could occur
and how much water supply could be obtained at specific locations where a dam might be
constructed. The trouble was that three of us young engineers had to do all the boring
work of looking up records, tabulating and adding them, do this and that, and then bring
them into the boss.
about three months of that, I got tired of tabulating rainfall and
runoff records, getting a hydrograph, and bringing it into the boss so he could use it and
make the decision about what to do with it. He does all the studying, and would say,
"Now, you do that and then add this, and let's try a bigger flood." He did all the
interesting work and wrote the report on the feasibility of the project.
The Bureau of Reclamation had a little laboratory down in the basement in the old
Customs House in Denver. So I wandered down there, and was interested in the models.
I found that several Bureau dams were being model tested. I introduced myself to Jake
who was the director of the laboratory then. He asked if I were interested in
working in the lab, and I said, "Yes, I'd just came from Vicksburg where I'd worked in
the lab for a year, and I liked lab work. I told him I'd be interested in working in the
laboratory whenever he had a vacancy. It wasn't very long, a month or so, when I started
work in the laboratory. He arranged for me to work in the Bureau's lab, and I worked
there for about three years, mostly on hydraulic model studies of spillways and outlet
works for dams being designed by the Bureau. I learned a lot about hydraulics and dams
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