Theodore M.
recommendations to dredge the fishing boat harbor where it was and to rebuild
the jetty and put armor rock on the sand spit north of the south jetty to prevent
erosion. The project was authorized that way, even though it was a more costly
solution, because it was the only way the Corps could obtain the necessary
local cooperation. I suppose the project is still there, but I understand they have
to dump a lot of eight- and ten-ton boulders in there periodically to try to
prevent erosion of the sand spit and destruction of the fishing boat harbor.
Although my proposed solution was rejected, I learned a lot from this
experience. First, the importance of working with the local interests from the
very beginning of the planning of a proposed project. And then I learned
a-well, I won't say a lot-1 learned enough about shore protection and jetties
and shore erosion processes to give me a little different water resources
background which helped me in later years.
Where do you pick up information on ocean hydrology as distinct from river?
In other words, you know, did you take courses at Johns Hopkins that
specifically dealt with those kinds of subjects as distinct
No. The courses that I had at Johns Hopkins, and then particularly in the
graduate year, were dealing much more with hydrology of rivers. Riverine
hydrology.
Right.
And, particularly, flood control on rivers. But what an engineer does when he
gets into a new field is start reading, and you go to the library if you don't
have your own library, and you start reading about it, and the Corps has in its
own files a tremendous amount of background information. In fact, there are
some Corps disaster areas in this area. I think it was at Tillamook, Oregon,
where the Corps put in jetties to protect the entrance to the harbor which cut
off the littoral drift and essentially demolished an area they called the Bay
Ocean Peninsula.
We had lots of pictures of that. We read reports on what had happened. The
Corps has an institutional memory of these things, and it is not hard to tap into
it for information. But the reason that the Seattle district engineer reversed us
was that I hadn't worked closely enough with the local sponsors as the new
plan was developed. A lot of this happened after I had left the Seattle District.
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