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A:: No. I didn't give any thought to that. I don't think anyone did at the time. I
was a survey party chief and we were laying out a railroad track and
warehouses, and the only thing that made us realize that this was dangerous
stuff was that we were locating bunkers to store phosphorus in with mounds of
earth over them. But the warehouses-I guess I didn't have any perception of
exactly what was going to be in them and what was going to be done there.
You remember the war was going on over in Europe at the time, but we
weren't in it. I didn't really think too much about that. A young man of 21
years old in 1940 had other things on his mind than thinking about
environmental consequences of what he was doing. I wasn't 22 until the end
of that summer.
So I didn't really think about that, and I'm not sure anybody did. It's pretty
obvious that they didn't, even many years later when they really had some
dangerous stuff there. If anybody thought about it, they apparently didn't take
any action, because the employees there were convicted. I think it was a raw
deal for these people, who were doing what they were paid to do, to be
convicted. I haven't read any details about it, however.
Anyway, the job got bigger at the end of the summer and the Constructing
Quartermaster decided that they needed to have an architect-engineer on the
job. I think the firm they hired was probably Whitman, Requardt, and Smith,
which was a big Baltimore engineering firm. When they came in they brought
in another survey party. Of course, we had all of the locations surveyed and
laid out, but they said, "Well, we're going to have to go over and do all of that
over again to make sure that it's right." I started to boil inside, because I
thought our work was pretty good.
Spillway Design Section, Bureau of Reclamation, Denver, Colorado
When I went home that night I had a letter from the Bureau of Reclamation out
in Denver offering me a job as a junior engineer, P-1. That was providential,
and although the salary was just the same, ,000 a year, it seemed like a step
up in status. This offer also came as a result of an exam I had taken when I was
still in college. It had taken them a year and a half to get around to certifying
me for employment as a junior engineer. The Bureau wanted somebody to go
out in the field and survey for irrigation projects. The job seemed to be right
up my alley.
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