Jacob H. Douma
I departed from Dulles at 9:00 PM and arrived in London about 8:00 in the morning.
would take a room in a hotel right at London airport, and by the time I got there it would
be about
o'clock. I'd have to check through immigration and customs at London
airport before I could get out and go to the hotel.
I'd get four to five hours sleep, and return to the airport in time to catch the 5: 30 PM
Pakistani Airlines flight, which arrived in Islamabad at about 6: 30 in the morning. After
landing I waited an hour to get my luggage and spent another hour getting through
customs and immigration. At about
or so, I would walk out the front door of the
terminal and see a man with a sign, "Douma." He was the driver that drove me by car
to the
dam site. It was a 1
drive, and I would arrive at the dam site
about
AM.
Usually, I would be taken to a large house where TAMS employees lived, and I stayed
while at the dam site. If I arrived on a Saturday or Sunday, I would rest the remainder of
that day. If I arrived on a weekday, I would rest a few hours and then inspect the site with
the resident engineer. Occasionally, the driver said that he was instructed to take me
directly to the conference room upon my arrival.
I remember one time when I walked into the conference room, the board members and
TAMS and Pakistani engineers were all there. They clapped and said, "Well, we can start
the meeting now. I said, "You know, I've been riding airplanes for the last two nights.
What time does the meeting start in the afternoon?" I was told that "In Pakistan, we eat
lunch late, and then we have to have an afternoon siesta. The meeting will begin at about
3:00 o'clock. I said, "That's allright, I'll see you at 3:00 o'clock." I spent a week there
on that trip.
I had another interesting experience on the
project. After the diversion tunnel was
repaired, there were problems with the main spillway, which has large tainter gates on the
spillway crest. They wanted to keep a lot of water in the reservoir, so those gates were
closed, and the water level was 10 or feet above the spillway crest.
A small amount of water was leaking underneath the gates and along the side of the gates.
The chute was wet all the time, and at the upper end, just below the gates, there was moss
on the concrete chute floor. There was a ladder from the top of the chute wall to the floor
of the chute.
I decided to go down the ladder and take a closer look at the gates. When I reached the
bottom of the ladder, I saw the moss and noticed that the chute floor was practically flat
there, with just enough slope so the water would run off. So I didn't pay too much
attention. When I took my feet off the ladder and stepped on the moss, both feet slipped
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