Margaret S. Petersen
in Omaha in the ' 5 0 ' s so I'm not unsympathetic to their point of view. I was unsympathetic
to their ethics.
they actually have any trained engineers, civil engineers, that worked with them?
No, but they hired consultants who would come in to look at our work for a short period and
claim our computations were wrong and theirs were better. In general the consultants did
not understand the rationale underlying our assumptions and the details of the studies. Corps
projects and studies are complicated, and a lot of basic information is needed; hydrologic
data, stream flow data, and so forth. We spent months doing what their consultants tried to
redo in hours, always starting from the assumption that our computations were wrong and
slanted to justify the project. Even statements in some of the Environmental Impact
Statements prepared for us by environmental firms we hired were so biased that we had to
ask for revisions.
Jerry Brown was Governor of California at that time and the heads of many of the state
agencies appointed by him were attorneys from the eastern U.S. The head of the state
Department of Water Resources was an attorney, although they had an engineer in the
position of "chief engineer." It was a very bad situation in that politics, rather than
engineering, seemed to be their foremost consideration.
Well, you were probably in one of the worst states to have this thing happen to you because
of its environmental community, especially up in that northern part of California.
I'm sure. NEPA enabled the Corps to do things that previous legislation didn't. But the
A:
environmentalists didn't understand that we couldn't do something just because they thought
it was right when we had no authority to do it. They didn't understand the legislative
mandates. You know, think with
a lot of it has worked out, but that was a bad time.
So bad that it basically drove you out.
A:
Yes. After seven years and so little progress, it appeared to be a no-win situation.
Well, you would have been at the real cutting edge of dealing with these things in planning
at that time, because planners were the
that had to handle all of this.
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