Water Resources People and Issues
What I started to say about Nathaniel Wollman is that when the bureaucracy
knocked him down and told him he couldn't do what he wanted to do, the next
day he would come up with a way to get around their objections. This would
go on, week after week, and he used a trial and error method because we were
having to take a lot of short cuts to do what we wanted to do. He reminded me
of a toy that we had. At that particular time, I had two daughters who were
babies. Or I should say one of them was a baby and the older one was three
years old. And they had a toy which was a roly-poly kind of a little figure of
a man, and no matter what you did, when you knocked him down, he came
back up. That was the visualization I had of Nat Wollman, because no matter
how many obstacles they put in his way, he would come back up.
Well, he must have impressed you because you later used him on the National
Water Commission too, after that.
A: No, you are thinking of Abel Wolman.
Didn't Nat Wollman, though, write one of these studies for the National Water
Commission too? I'll try to check. I had the idea he had.
I tried to get him, but he couldn't do it. By that time, he was dean at the
University of New Mexico, and he didn't have time to work for the National
Water Commission as I recall it. But he had refined his study on water supply
and demand, which was published with a co-author named [Gilbert] Bonem.
They found all kinds of mistakes that had been made in the short cuts that we
had taken, including a gross mistake that was made on the water supply side,
not so much in the water supply, but in the storage calculations.
Getting back to the Select Committee, all of the studies were in draft form, and
most were finished and published by the summer of 1960. To wrap up what I
considered to be the first phase, I wrote a draft of a staff report to the
committee. I wrote that to kind of summarize these studies. But it covered the
water supply/demand study even though it was still in the very preliminary
draft stage. I sent a copy to Abel Wolman, and he sent it back with many
suggested changes. He really panned it and raised a lot of questions.
So I fixed it up as best as I could and gave a copy to Senator Kerr and told him
that it was the first draft of the summary of phase one of the study and that I'd
like to get the committee to approve so we would go on to phase two. Phase
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