Water Resources People and Issues
Fish and Wildlife, and the Park Service. I can't remember who prepared the
one on Alaska.
Water Supply and Demand Study
The principal new idea that I put into the program was the idea of developing
the water supply/demand relationship. It was not an original idea with me. A
gentleman named Doug Woodward, who was on the staff of the Geological
Survey, had written a paper for the Army War College on the supply/demand
relationships for water. He did it really for the whole country, and, of course,
it does show there's plenty of water in the United States.
I had read that paper, and the idea kind of intrigued me, and so I got the idea
that this would be a good focus for the committee's efforts to develop water
supply/demand relationships for the individual river basins to show where the
shortages were showing up.
We divided the country up into 22 water resource regions. Working with
people from the Department of Agriculture, we divided the whole country into
river basins, but we had to do it by county lines because all the economic data
which drive the demand side was prepared by counties. The Geological Survey
set up a whole section for me, headed up by a wonderful hydrologist named
Roy Oltman, with a staff of five or six people to work on hydrology for the
Senate Select Committee. We could have never done what we did if it hadn't
been for that group, as well as other groups.
We had a committee of representatives from the federal agencies to help with
the coordination of the studies. Howard Cook was the representative from the
Corps of Engineers. Carl Brown from the Soil Conservation Service
represented Agriculture. When I saw that I would need more help to put all this
together, Ed Ackerman, who had been chief of the water resources program at
the Resources for the Future before he went to the Carnegie Institution, put me
in touch with Resources for the Future. They had just given a grant to an
economist from the University of New Mexico on sabbatical named Nathaniel
Wollman to work on water supply/demand relationships. Nat Wollman was a
most unusual person in that he was-1 don't know whether to say indefatigable
or what-but you could not discourage him. He was in Washington for only a
year, or maybe two years, to work on this project, but he was convinced that
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