Margaret S. Petersen
They all had power, yes. There are still a few dams being built including several large dams
in southern California, but certainly nothing like in the `40's and
There are still some
sites and (while they will tell you the best sites, the cheaper sites, have already been built on),
there are still a lot of places where you could build a small power dam or where you need
good quality water. But with the environmental climate that we have, they'll never be built.
You know, we couldn't build Hoover today. Yet without it, Southern California, Arizona
would be.
Yes, without Hoover and Lake Powell, Glen Canyon--it would be almost unlivable in that
area.
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, when we were graduate students we took a two-semester course
in dam design from
a Swedish engineer who had worked for the Corps.
Did. he go into much on the designing that was then being done in MRD on the main stem
dams?
A:
Yes. When I read his class notes, I can hear him talking in his thick Swedish accent. He was
always going to make his notes into a book, but he never got to [do] it.
Too much work?
He' been dead for a long time. He was interested in why dams fail. I don't know whether
A:
he worked on Fort Peck, but he was very knowledgeable about the slide at Fort Peck Dam
when it was under construction.
Which professor most influenced your subsequent career, who impressed you the most or
influenced you the most?
A:
I don't know. That would be hard to say. I suppose that the hydraulics people influenced
me the most. We had several young professors.
Albertson and John
were
there, in addition to Rouse and Joe Howe. Joe Howe was the head of Department of
Mechanics and Hydraulics, which was separate from the hydraulics laboratory and the Civil
Engineering Department. They all influenced us. We were also, of course, influenced by the
Corps people we worked for in the lab, Robert
Marvin Webster, and Martin Nelson,
because we worked there so much of the time. We learned a lot from all of them.
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