Memoirs
So far we have covered the first six months or so, a period of effort to get ourselves in a position
of confidence to take on the issues before us. There were many.
In spite of the National Environmental Policy Act and everything else, the Missouri River
continued to be cantankerous. The controls on it, the reservoirs behind the six dams from Gavins
Point up to Fort Peck, did a magnificent job in flood control, hydroelectric power production, and
water for irrigation. There were constant problems of local flooding, of getting overdue projects
on line, and as mentioned, there was a shortage of funds to do all those things.
Gus Karabatsos was the chief of Planning in Missouri River Division. We discussed how to
handle some 110 planning projects for which there was just piddling amounts of money each
year. Consequently, no project had enough money to do much. So Gus came up with a program
which I called "Put Your Money on the Winners," or "Get Rid of the Dogs." When we started
into it, it seemed simple, but we soon realized that these bread-and-butter projects for the
members of Congress were important to be kept alive to satisfy their local constituencies.
We were successful in the long run to clean out many projects with no future. Congress several
years later took care of the problem on a national basis by passing legislation that dropped
inactive projects. I believe our effort in MRD, while painful and tedious, set the pattern.
Fortunately, most of our governors and congressional people were supportive because they could
see that on a statewide basis they'd be better off having a couple of projects sufficiently funded
to produce a needed project as opposed to or 20 so lightly funded that no project planning was
completed. That may not seem like a big program, but it was a ground breaker.
The environmental impact statement problem became quite serious because we needed to have
one for every project. Our priorities were to start with those projects ready to begin construction,
followed by those already under construction, and finally those in operation.
A few projects became landmark-one was Truman Dam. Truman had a potential downstream
problem with the paddlefish, an endangered species. Since we had not had time to finish an
environmental impact statement, the project was about to be stopped. I was in Manning Seltzer's
office, the general counsel of the Corps, when I learned of the stoppage. Manning said we had
to have an environmental impact statement or the project was going to be enjoined and stopped.
I asked the district engineer to put his best people together in a room and work until they got the
thing done. By today's standards, the results would be considered a poor job, but in those days,
with the lack of experience and guidance on what made a good EIS [environmental impact
statement], he was able to meet the requirement and keep that project going.
Others were stopped for a time, and some of them ultimately were never built because of an
inability to satisfy the environmental problem or criticism. The operation of the Missouri River
system itself was a complex environmental problem. So the environmental movement, if it did
nothing else, kept our planners and our engineers rather busy, catching up with the requirements
of the law.
At the same time that was happening, we were discovering some environmental situations which
would ultimately require attention in our operations. The bald eagle is an American treasure, of
course, and it was an endangered species. Fort Randall Dam's area downstream from the spillway
and its stilling basin became an attractive location for the eagles. So we spent a lot of time on the
eagle problem. The black-footed ferret was an endangered species and it existed in the Dakotas.
We had to attend to that problem.
One day I received a call from our resident engineer in the Rocky Mountain office, which was
really under the Omaha District but the district engineer wasn't available. The resident engineer
said that two ducks had been found dead on the pond that morning at Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
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