Margaret S. Petersen
No. Gomez retired in about 1974, before I did. Geandrot followed Gomez, then George
A:
Dick Vasquez was the last one who retired, and I think Lou Whitney is the Chief
of the Engineering Division there now. Doyle was a civil engineer and a self-made
hydrologist. He knew more about hydrology of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Basin than the
people who were doing the hydrology for us.
Well, that's true of a lot of people. A lot of what your Bachelors Degree is in doesn't make
any difference.
Right. It's what you learn while you're doing it.
Frank Snyder, for example, was straight civil engineering, and he never did civil engineering
at all in any of his career. He was all in hydrology and hydraulics.
A:
There really isn't a lot of hydraulics in the normal four-year C.E. program. Even here at
Arizona, we don't offer very much.
So you rejoined Irene in Sacramento?
A:
Irene had transferred to the Sacramento District of the Corps in the spring of 1964, shortly
after I had gone to Vicksburg. At that point, we had lived together for about 20 years. Also,
I found that Vicksburg at that time was not really a great place to live for a single person.
It was depressing. I lived in what was the best apartment building in town at that time. I got
an option on a lot and had plans drawn to build a house. Finally, I decided I just didn't want
to stay there.
So I also transferred to Sacramento to the planning branch. They hired me primarily for my
experience with navigation. I worked on the deep-draft San Francisco Bay to Stockton
Project, the Sacramento River Shallow Draft Project, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,
local flood protection projects, and large multiple-purpose dams such as Marysville.
The last big project I worked on was the Marysville Lake multiple-purpose dam and reservoir
which was not built. At that time, Marysville was about a billion dollar project because it
storage power component. It was probably the first project the
included a large
Corps had ever estimated at a billion dollars. The State of California had finished
construction of Oroville Dam, and the California Department of Water Resources had a large
design and construction group headed by H.G. Dewey, who was head of the Mississippi
Basin Model Branch in Jackson when we were there. The state wanted to construct
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