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<br />understands sex. If you want to get people involved,
<br />you are going to have to get them involved in ways
<br />that everyone can understand.
<br />
<br />,Just a little more perspective before we get into ways
<br />to do this stuff. When faced with trying to analyze a
<br />river basin and to look at what can be done in a river
<br />basin as an analyst, I take what I call the Bert Lahr
<br />approach. Bert Lahr was the guy who played the Cow-
<br />ardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz and would say "If I
<br />were king of the forest." In fact, that's a good ap-
<br />proach. The first thing you have to do is, realizing that
<br />you are king of the forest, is to realize that you are
<br />responsible for the health and well-being of all of your
<br />subjects. If you forget that they are going to revolt and
<br />chop your head off. So you have to treat all objectives
<br />as valid. There are a whole pile of objectives up there
<br />and all objectives are legitimate and all objectives are
<br />equaL Well at least as equal as the animals on Orwell's
<br />Animal Farm. Some were a little more equal than
<br />others.
<br />
<br />Second, you want to say that "all right, if I am going
<br />to set up a way to operate this river basin and I have
<br />a bunch of facilities lying out there, I would like to
<br />start out by doing some analysis which figures out
<br />what I can do with the river basin. Then when I figure
<br />out what the mix of benefits I can get from the river
<br />basin is, I would like to do the politics. That is, I would
<br />like to allocate those benefits among all of tbe users.
<br />and everybody can't have everything because there are
<br />tradeoffs among the benefits between the users." Once
<br />you have solved the problem of allocating the benefits
<br />then you have solved the politics. By agreeing where
<br />the tradeoffs lie, then you can design institutions to
<br />run the river. Unfortunately in this country we usually
<br />start with the institutions, then they have to sort out
<br />who gets what before everybody knows what it is, and
<br />then maybe we get to doing the analysis. That has to
<br />happen at least to some degree, in any case, because
<br />our analytical methods keep getting better. So in fact,
<br />we have to keep looking at what we can get from the
<br />river systems and keep improving our operations on
<br />a real time basis to get things better.
<br />
<br />My normal role is helping people figure out what
<br />they can do, not what they should do. Finally, the rest
<br />of my remarks are going to center on helping with the
<br />kind of analysis that you have to do.
<br />
<br />In dealing with water, that is water for water supply,
<br />there are two issues. There's quantity and reliability.
<br />Sometimes. probably not so much here, there's the
<br />issue of quality. Those two things are not separable.
<br />You can give a man a water right for 500 acre-feet a
<br />year or 5,000 acre-feet a year and that means that's
<br />
<br />the amount of water he is allowed to withdraw. Then
<br />if you tell him that water right is only good one year
<br />out of five, you've told him a lot about the value of
<br />the water he has got. Quantity and reliability both
<br />need to be considered when you are considering how
<br />valuable you are making your resource. You have to
<br />look at getting those objectives right. When you are
<br />looking at reliability, you are, in essence, looking at
<br />uncertainty.
<br />
<br />Uncertainty is a very difficult concept to get across
<br />to people, but it can be done. Unfortunately in most
<br />of our analyses people will look at a critical period and
<br />while that tells you exactly what would happen over
<br />a small period, it gives you no feel for the reliability
<br />of the system. There are ways to look at the reliability
<br />of the system. How? You can look at time traces and
<br />some other things which I will show you in just a min-
<br />ute. In fact, I will do that now (Figure I).
<br />
<br />Here is a case in an analysis I am working on, Con-
<br />nolly, which is a water supply reservoir north of At-
<br />lanta. This is Lake Lanier. Lake Lanier, as it's
<br />operated by the Corps under current operating con-
<br />ditions, would have an operating rule that looks like
<br />the black line. Now it never runs out of water. 1050
<br />is well above the minimum conservation pool, but the
<br />red line on there is the minimum desirable pool level
<br />for recreation. As you can see under the current op-
<br />erating strategy, the minimum desired level for rec-
<br />reation can be violated for several years running. It
<br />also just so bappens that the dam closed in 1959 and
<br />the period from 1959 on sees very, very few violations
<br />of the minimum desired pool leve]s for recreation. In
<br />the 1980s, somewhat more normal hydrology is re-
<br />turned and you are seeing some very severe problems
<br />with operating the reservoir for recreation. Now it is
<br />clear from this that despite the relative level of as-
<br />surance of tbe recreation pool that the people around
<br />Lanier have enjoyed faT the last twenty years, the his-
<br />torical record is that they really do not have that kind
<br />of reliability. In fact, recrelltion is not the primary
<br />purpose of this reservoir and consequently, if you are
<br />going to try and maintain these levels in the face of
<br />tbese kinds of droughts, sometbing else is going to have
<br />to give.
<br />
<br />The point here is that if you look solely at the period
<br />of tbe 1950s, wbich is the drought of record, it would
<br />look like there's never any recreation. If you look at
<br />the longer record, you begin to see a frequency. A more
<br />acceptable frequency eurve might look like this under
<br />the current operating policies. Tbe flow below Atlanta
<br />is shown by the solid line and the flow target i, shown
<br />by the dashed line. There is a secondary flow target
<br />that says when the reservoir gets really low, you lower
<br />
<br />7
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