Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
Emory Lane
What was Emory Lane like?
He was one of the kindest people I have ever known. When I took hydrology from him as
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an undergraduate, there were only two of us, one South American and me, so we met in his
office. He didn't use the book; just talked to us. Actually, I took hydrology again at the end
of graduate school when Joe Howe taught it. Lane had worked in China and had a daughter,
who was a doctor; I believe she was in China at the time. He was especially kind from the
standpoint of being willing to help a young woman.
Lane had certainly done a lot of interesting things. We visited him at the Bureau's lab in
Denver in 1947 after we finished school and he had left Iowa; he showed us around the
laboratories. We also saw him later when he was consulting for the Omaha District and we
were at the Missouri River Division. He retired from the Bureau of Reclamation in 1953 and
then taught at Fort Collins until 1957.
One of the things that I worked on for the Corps as an undergraduate was the design of a
point-integrating sediment sampler. This was a joint project of the Corps, the USGS [U.S.
Geological Survey], and I think ARS [Agricultural Research Service]. At that time there
wasn't any reliable equipment for measuring suspended sediments in a river. I worked with
Paul Benedict from the USGS on the design of the P-46 sampler, which was the first of a
number of sediment samplers designed under that joint program.
We finished school in February 1947, and in July of `47, the Corps lab was moved from Iowa
to the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota.
Sediment Sampling
How sophisticated was the sediment sampling technology at that time?
Up to that point It was pretty crude. I remember Professor Lane came back from a
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conference once with a little sketch he'd made on tablet paper of a sampler design that was
basically a milk bottle with just a little bit of tape around it. You had to manually open it.
There had not been a lot of concern about sediment load until about this time when the Corps
was beginning to seriously think about developing the Upper Missouri River. There hadn't
been big sediment problems on the rivers on which the Corps had built locks and dams, but
it was recognized that the Missouri would have a problem.
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