Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
One of the alternatives they showed was to remove every other cell along the guard wall, but
they didn't comment about what this would do to the velocities in the lower lock approach,
and I don't know how they could estimate that theoretically. They could save a lot of money
if they took out every other cell which doubled the space between cells, but more of the
spillway discharge would pass between the cells into the lower approach to the lock.When
a tow enters the approach, there might be a problem. I don't know how they could examine
that on the computer.
Well, when you think of what they can do on computers, you think they could get that into
it, too, wouldn't you?
A:
This is three dimensional.
With the computers now available, it's now a very different world than when you were first
working in a hydraulics laboratory?
A:
Yes, absolutely.
Dam Break Studies
Did it basically change everything completely, when you got into computers?
A:
I don't think so, initially. Computers have had more effect since I retired in 1977. I think
computers have had a tremendous effect on hydrology, on forecasting, and hydrologic
studies. Computers have greatly simplified sediment transport and backwater computations,
which were terribly tedious.
One of the interesting things that we did in the early '50's in the Missouri River Division was
to investigate failure of dams on the Upper Missouri. Gail Hathaway was concerned -- this
was not too long after World War II -- about what would happen downstream if those large
storage dams were breached. We ran some tests on the Missouri River section of the
Mississippi Basin Model at Jackson that showed that failure of those dams would fill the
valley bluff to bluff, all of the way down. You really didn't have to know the details; you
knew that it would a disaster if it happened and especially if an upper dam were breached and
overtopped the next one downstream, and that overtopped the next one, etc.We did some
dam break computations manually, and they were without a computer and very tedious and
difficult. Now dam break studies are done on the computer.
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