Water Resources People and Issues
the Sierras, and the Colorado mountains, as well as the Selkirks and the
Canadian Rockies. I had a personal hope that the mountainous areas could be
preserved as wilderness. That's why I was sympathetic when Ben Thompson
suggested the importance of preserving wild and scenic rivers in the Park
Service report to the Select Committee.
I never did get further involved in the passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers
Act. But among other things, I used to enjoy white water rafting, and it's nice
to think that there will be some streams that don't have dams on them and will
still have rapids. But it is a fact that some of the best white water boating in
this area is below the Corps dam on the Youghiogeny and some of the other
rivers where they make releases specifically for that purpose. I suppose this is
under the authority of this Recreation Act.
Going back to the use of benefits to justify projects, the Corps, when it
recommended the Salem Church project on the Rappahannock River in about
1948, about 60 percent of the benefits were recreation benefits. The project
was never built, and I'm not sure what the percentage of the benefits was for
recreation, but it was at least half. So in preparing for the Interior
Department's comments on that report, which were required under the Flood
Control Act of 1944, we took in a holier-than-thou approach, and pointed out
that we couldn't really see the great advantage of having that much flat water
recreation when you had the whole estuary of the Rappahannock below
Fredericksburg and the Chesapeake Bay, and so we questioned those benefits.
I have the
that the recreation legislation just put some new parameters,
with congressional and executive office sanction, on what the agencies had
been doing for some time.
Let me turn away from legislation for a moment and talk a little bit about
what's happening within the engineering community in terms of water
resources and planning development. In particular, I wanted to get your
response to what's coming out of Harvard University. I'm talking, of course,
about the Harvard Water Program, of multiobjective analysis as distinct from
multipurpose. Did you get involved in any of this activity from the Harvard
Water Program. When did you first learn about it and what was your response
to it?
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