Margaret S. Petersen
Design, Flood Control and Sediment. We took a two-semester course from
Have
you encountered that name?
and Dam Design
Yes.
was Swedish--he had come here as a young man after he finished his schooling
in Sweden. I don't know what he did initially, but he had worked for the Corps on the
Muskingum Project in Ohio. Then he worked on Denison Dam on the Red River, north of
Dallas, which was built during the early `40's. He later worked for the Missouri River
Division in dam design in hydraulics and geotech. After he retired from the Omaha District,
Joe Howe had prevailed on him to come over to Iowa City every third week and teach a
graduate course in dam design. So every third week we had a three-hour class three days a
There were, of course, no books. He had his own mimeographed
week from
notes, which I still have. When I started teaching here at the University of Arizona, I went
back to his notes for some material because it was still relevant. In fact, his notes might be
something that you would like to have for your history collection. A lot of his notes came
out of feasibility reports and other work on Denison, and some of the other dams.That was
probably the most interesting course we took.
At the end of the school year in June 1953, he took the dam design class on an inspection trip
through the Muskingum area and the Tennessee Valley to look at various dams and
hydroelectric plants. TVA still had several dams under construction at that time.
The Muskingum Project had a lot of small dams, didn't it?
A:
Small dams, yes.
So that was basically the Miami River Conservancy District, with a number of small
impoundment dams. Was there navigation?
A:
No, and in fact, most of the impoundment areas are dry most of the time; they are to retard
flood flows.
Sort of like the Los Angeles District's debris dams.
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