Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
A:
They're smaller. Many of the dams looked just like a grassy hill. Well, they did then. I
don't know what they look like now.
Dam Design
I've never see one. Dam design is sort of an exotic field, isn't it?
A:
Dam design is very interesting in that there are a lot of hydraulic problems involved, such
as hydraulics related to hydropower plants and seepage through earth dams, in addition to
design of hydraulic components such as spillways, outlet works, diversion, etc.
Is that an area that has suffered a lot recently, because of the lack of building big dams?
We're losing our expertise as people retire, for sure. What bothers me is that the
A:
infrastructure is there and we have to have people who understand the design; the operation,
maintenance, and rehab problems, and what can be done about them. If you don't have
experience. I don't know what the Corps is doing now, but from time to time there's been
a push to contract out various kinds of services.
We did this in the environmental area when I worked in Sacramento because we simply
didn't have enough environmental staff for the volume of work. What happened on the
environmental contracts I was involved in was that we basically specified what was needed
and then we reviewed and revised the reports because they didn't understand the projects
sufficiently to have taken everything into consideration. I suspect that at this point there's
a better understanding of what is involved, but I'm not sure that there's a good understanding
of how projects operate or the inter-relationship of projects.
Well, that's one of the things that some of the people that I've talked to, like Frank Snyder,
are concerned about--that the expertise is disappearing because there are no projects
anymore, and if there are no projects, nobody is doing that work. You had some dams with
power in MRD.
A:
Yes.
Q ..
Fort Peck, Gavins Point, and Randall all had power.
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