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<br />.... - . , , <br />r ,'l', ,. i <br />li U v - - <br /> <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 <br />