Water Resources People and Issues
When I left Seattle, I thought we had the thing all straightened out. We were
going to build a new fishing boat harbor. It wasn't going to cost the
government as much, but the local people would have to spend more, because
they'd have to build new docks and fish handling facilities for loading the fish
on trucks to take it to Aberdeen or Hoquiam where it is processed.
It was after I left that the decision was made to change the
recommendations-to change the report that I had prepared recommending the
new location for the fishing boat harbor. But this was just part of the project.
The most expensive part was the jetty, rebuilding the north and the south
jetties.
When I worked on this project I found a wealth of literature, and I did read a
lot of it. There's a lot of literature on the breakwaters and jetties and sea walls
on the Great Lakes. Some of the worst wave action is on Lake Superior, for
example, where you have tremendous wave action coupled with the extremes
of temperature and freezing. But those jetties on the Pacific Coast go out for
miles to keep the bar channels open. I think that the Grays Harbor jetties
originally went out maybe as much as 18,000 or 20,000 feet, because they put
them out past the ocean bar. The idea is to concentrate the tidal flow so that it
scours a channel through the bar that is built up by sediment discharged from
the river. There still may be a bar, but it will be out where it's so deep that you
can get your
or
draft shipping over it without trouble. And that's
why those jetties are so long. But there is tremendous wave action out there in
the deep water.
One of the things that was found out from some of the investigations was that
the waves had enough force to lift the to
blocks of sandstone used to
built the original jetty in the
up on top of the trestle used to rebuild the
jetty in 1930, which was at an elevation of or 20 feet above mean low
water.
Marriage
Q: What made you come to Washington?
A: During World War II it was almost impossible to use any annual leave. By the
end of the war since everyone earned 26 days of annual leave each year, I had
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