Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
down in Nashville, and they always thought they were a center of expertise. In this case, they
couldn't hold a candle in numbers of hydropower facilities to North Pacific Division--nor
could Little Rock.
Come navigation, however, the Ohio River Division was the largest builder of systems with
locks in them. The division had 20 locks and dams on the Ohio River and 41 on its
tributaries.
Q:
Yes.
A:
The Mississippi Valley Division, of course, had the open river expertise, but the Ohio River
Division had certainly built many more locks and dams of different varieties than they had.
When we got into the environmental mission, centers of expertise became a big thing
because we couldn't afford to put everyone into business. So, in Superfund the Corps started
with designated centers of expertise.
Another center of expertise that had begun five years before was for medical facilities
construction because of the longstanding problem of rapidly changing technology during the
time of design and construction. Design would be for a certain set of cabinets or items of
equipment, and by the time you were ready during construction to order the machine,
technology had leaped ahead a couple of years and the Medical Corps no longer wanted the
designed one. They had a new one. It would come with right-hand this instead of left-hand
that and different size so there had to be modifications to fit it into construction. Having
someone who was really up on medical facility design as a center of expertise was important.
Q:
Now, when you talk about the discussions with Civil Works' Program Division about how to
allocate cuts, then you, in turn, were having the same discussions with your districts, right,
who were waiting from you their particular required allocations.
A:
Yes.
Q:
That's what led you to do some of these things that you're talking about, I think.
A:
It was on the division level; we called the shots on that. Basically, what we would do was our
Chief of Programs, Lou Listerman, would put together the "program" from the districts,
working with their chiefs of programs. This included desired levels of staffing and funding
for levels of activity in the various mission areas and projects. Then the division would send
that forward, and we would have to justify it to Headquarters, USACE. Then cuts would
come, or other levels would be anticipated, or we would get an allocation that would say,
"This is all you're going to get." We would then go through the drills and analysis at division
headquarters, send it down to the district, get their viewpoint back of what this meant in
terms of impact, put those pieces together, and then dialogue back with USACE's Chief of
Programs in Civil Works.
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