Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
almost like a prosecutor and I was on the stand. He was nailing down where we were to make
sure we were moving out and implementing that project as conceived and on a responsive
timetable.
We had anticipated this, knowing his interest, and I had flown out to Williamson. I had been
with Senator Byrd earlier on the R. D. Bailey Dam dedication before I had even become the
division engineer. When it came time to dedicate R. D. Bailey Dam, which was in southern
West Virginia, the Chief of Engineers couldn't go, General Heiberg, the Civil Works
Director couldn't go, and so they asked me to represent them and fly out there with Senator
Byrd and back and give the remarks. They told him that, although not yet announced
officially, I was the future division engineer in the Ohio River Division, so the person he was
going to be working with would be there.
Senator Byrd really wanted to pin down where we were--and the 202 project was large and
not yet to the point of designing so we could start building something physically. What he
really wanted to tie down, like I guess any congressman wants, was something on the ground,
some visible action that things were happening. So, I was telling him at that point about
when we were going to start the first increment, a pumping station, at West Williamson--as
part of that project. He was interested when we were going to build the flood wall at
Williamson--we're talking about a 40-foot high wall--but we were still doing the
engineering on that project.
We laid out the program as we saw it. His questions really nailed us to the wall--he meant
that program to proceed rapidly, and he meant for us to deliver that program as it was. So, it
was a pretty strenuous 30, 35 minutes of questioning by Senator Byrd after only five weeks in
the job.
Q:
Some of those questions were probably actually directed at Gianelli, at the administration.
A:
He wasn't there.
Q:
He wasn't there?
A:
I don't know that he'd even been named by February or March. I just don't remember. He
didn't participate in that first year's testimony, so we didn't really know of his antipathy to
the project at that point in time. I mean, this was straight-on. We read the language, we
interpreted it the way we thought it was meant to be, and we testified as to how we were
going to proceed. It was later on that Secretary Gianelli interpreted it differently, when the
administration came up with the cost-sharing proposals that they wished to apply and Senator
Byrd didn't think they should apply because of the way the language was written. Gianelli
wanted to reduce the project, to be designed at standard project flood, back to a hundred
years' storm.
Q:
I think that level was perhaps even less than the big flood that this had all been in response
to, or it was pretty close. That was one of the issues, I think, that they wanted to bring you
back from standard project to something that was the original cause of all this.
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