Changes in attitude, changes in aptitude.

 

6 am. Day before Christmas.  We shuffled from professorial office to office in the Cushing Engineering building looking up our final grades next to our anonymous ID numbers taped to the doors.  My sophomore study-buddy and I absorbed the bad news with false aplomb and insouciance.  Calculus – D and C, Physics – C and F.  It went on like this for 6 dismal doors.  Woe is me.   We shuffled back to our gloomy dorm - humbled, contrite, scared.  

Sophomore means ‘wise fool’ and we thought we had it figured out.  Apparently not.  Too much partying, chasing girls, sleeping in and sluffing classes means ‘Academic Probation’.  Our parents are going to kill us, we thought. They didn’t.  Our old-school, working-class dads just asked us what we were going to do to keep from failing-out of our fancy-schmantzy, trophy-school.  Study harder, own the problem, we promised.  And we did.

Fast forward to the Engineering Honor Awards dinner the day before graduation.  We sat with our Groundling friends and applauded politely as the smart kids received their awards.  At the end they presented a special award for technical writing, and they called my name.  Our group went wild to have one of us included with the elite and standing on that stage.  My study-buddy shot off a bottle of Champaign.  Afterwards, as I caught up with my parents and showed them my plaque, my mom said to me, “you were the only one up there without a tie”.  Yes, but I was up there.

 

THE EMERALD MILE - KEVIN FEDARKO - REVIEW

 

Kevin Fedarko’s book The Emerald Mile was first published in the summer of 2013 and became an instant hit with river rats and water geeks alike.  It is basically the story of the spring of 1983 when the winter snow pack continued to build unexpectedly in the Rocky Mountains until Memorial Day weekend when it all started to melt all at once.  This snow melt runoff caused unprecedented flooding along the Colorado River systems that stressed the Bureau of Reclamation on-stream dams, their engineers and their operators.  From this adversity came an opportunity for a select, almost mythical, group of river runners and guides.  They seized the moment, as well as the high water, and attempted to break the fastest rowing record thru the Grand Canyon.  These stories are seamlessly woven together in this book to provide an enlightening and entertaining story of the various, often competing, special interest groups, and stakeholders of the rivers and the water in the west.

Kevin Fedarko was originally a staff writer for Time magazine and a contributor to Esquire and Outside as well as other magazines.  He is a part time river guide in the Grand Canyon which manifests as respect, almost reverence, for that place and the river that carved it.  This may contribute to his over-the-top storytelling and his fraternity to the culture of the river guides.  Every chapter is an adventure, and every subsequent chapter is an exciting opportunity that is not to be missed.  He also translates the complex hydrologic engineering concepts and numbers into layman terms that flow like water.  The book therefore reads itself and is impossible to put down. 

Along with his complete history of river running and the development of the culture of the western river guides, Fedarko does equally well in describing the operating engineers for the Bureau of Reclamation at Glen Canyon Dam.  They are first seen anxiously watching car sized sandstone boulders shooting from the spillway tunnels and then hopefully putting plywood on the dam’s spillway gates to hold back the relentlessly rising level of Lake Powell.  Only BOR dam operator Tom Gambel really knows how close we really came to losing the dam that year.  From this gripping true story we all become more aware of the power, persistence and patience of the Colorado River from this story.   As these competing cultures converge in a crescendo of crisis, Fedarko navigates the storylines like a well season river guide riding an invisible eddy line. 

 

The story starts benignly enough at the beginning, where most good stories start.  Don Garcia, a captain in the 1540 Coronado expedition sent to find the seven golden cities of Cibola, accidently stumbles upon the Grand Canyon and is relatively unimpressed.  From that inauspicious first sighting of the Canyon by a white men, to the courageous first navigation of the Canyon in 1869 by John Wesley Powell, the story proceeds systematically to the dam builders, conservationist and the river runners of modern times. 

Martin Linton is presented as the enlightened entrepreneur and environmentalist who perfects the method of running the river in elegant but fragile wooden Dory boats.  He also fights along side David Brower of the Sierra Club against the dam builders for the preservation of the canyon.  His Dorys are subsequently named after environmental tragedies and we are introduced to a beaten and battered boat called the Emerald Mile that is named after an old growth, Redwood clear cut in Northern California.  This bastard boat is adopted by guru guide Kenton Grua and meticulously repaired and rebuilt for its epic run. 

Along with his equally skillful and obsessive friends, Steve Reynolds and Rudi Petschek, Grua ignores the National Park Service closing of the flooded river and, on the night of June 25 1983, launches the Emerald Mile just below the dam into a river swollen to almost 100,000 cubic feet per second.  This book is unmistakably about this historic run but it is wrapped nicely in the other side stories of the canyon, the river, the dams, the conservationists, the guides, the bureaucrats and the competing interests for the American west. 

It could be the text book of a Western Water 101 course and stands among the great books in this category along with Cadillac Dessert by Mark Reisner and Beyond the 100^th Meridian by Wallace Stegnar.  The Colorado River is the poster boy for the exploitation of the waters and the resources of the American West and this book is a revelation of the complex consequences that arise when you mess with mother nature, for thrills or for profit.

This is also the story of hubris and arrogance, confidence and adventure and the surprisingly counter-intuitive forces of nature on our unsustainable life style.   It is a rollicking ride full of the hyperbole and didactic exaggeration, courage and legend and the conquering of the gear and the fear that is the lexicon of the river culture.  Strap yourself in and prepare for a frantic and fantastic journey.  You will not be disappointed.

APPARENT VERACITY - COMMUNICATION AND CALIBRATION FOR DAM HYDOLOGIST ASDSO 2023 - PALM SPRINGS

 

For engineers, getting the right answer is not the problem, communicating it is.  Take Global Warming or Y2K for example of bad communication.   Using the right tools, models and equations, assumptions and data is key.  Communicating, teaching and selling the proper problem and solution to the various clients, regulators and political powers-that-be is possibly the most important part of the process.  This includes the media, lawyers, politicians and the public that think we fake elections and moon landings.   

 

We have all heard the medical doctor learning process for procedures.  Learn it, do it, teach it.   I contend that our learning process should consist of learning models, doing models, teaching models and finally defending a model in a court of law where everyone throws stones at you to create reasonable doubt and throw your entire model out.  I had such an opportunity. 

 

I worked on a dam failure trial for 5 years, because of Covid, and learned some good lessons.  After my client’s failure I did the field forensics and had a fair idea of what had happened but convinced myself and the client that I had to do a lot of expensive HEHMS and RAS 2D modeling to prove it.  They agreed to an unlimited budget (since they all think they will win, and the other side will have to pay for it).  Not only would we prove that this flood was an Act of God or a ‘Force Majeure’ – something unavoidable - we would also satisfy the ‘but – for’ defense that the results would have happened ‘but – for’ (with or without) or our contribution. 

I was stoked and modeled my face off and did some of the best work of my career modeling and calibrating the model and communicating my results to our legal team.  It was like playing with a slot machine or Turbo tax where the numbers go up and down all day long.  I can almost hear the bells ringing.  It is my concept of Apparent Computer Veracity where everything looks true on computers.  I can make a model say anything.  Liars model and models lie. 

Sometimes we approach models with a preconceived notion of what we want to prove and justify with Apparent Computer Veracity. Sometimes we can back into the preconceived solutions that we want.  Sometimes we adjust reality to fit the model.  Everything must be tied to reality.  Regulators are savvy and resistant to this backing-in process and owners usually

think it is too fancy and will cost more money. What we must strive for is the truth, no matter how surprising or inconvenient.  Garbage in equals garbage out. 

 

I spent years recreating the storm and rain-on-snowpack event in data free NE Nevada.  Big country, no precipitation or flow gages.   I calibrated everything to hypothetical and to real events, data, measurements.  I used contiguous and equivalent data employing normalized regressions, considering proximity, area, altitude, elevation angle and aspect.  I had 1000 photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining where it is at. 

 

I even learned and used the latest versions of the models since my lawyers said my 1974 HEC-I punch card version would be laughed out of court, even if the algorithms were the same.   I surveyed cross sections and highwater marks and calibrated my 50 miles of routing through canyons and across an alluvial plane and over several dams and bridge crossings.  I balanced grid size and time intervals for reasonable convergence and results over a million acres and ten days.  I ran sensitivity analysis and a Monte Carlo distribution of solutions to land on the one most probable, most likely and the most defendable.

 

When I finished, I noticed that everything in the system worked well but the answer always depended on one undersized culvert under a highway that obviously backed up enough attenuated dam breach water to cause a second, larger breach that was responsible for the damage downstream.  The answer was simple and elegant, but the robust modeling led me there and helped me communicate the results to our esteemed team of lawyers.  I could not help but wonder if the solution could have been more easily formulated with better engineering and imagination.  Did I model it just because I can?  As a farmer rancher once cautioned me about overthinking a project – “We ain’t building pianos here.”              Simplify.

 

When we presented all the technical results at a mock trial and watched the resulting jury deliberations, we realized that we had missed the mark.  Even as I patiently and respectfully, but not condescendingly explained units of CFS and ACFT, they were more concerned with my tie and haircut than they were about my infiltration rates or Manning Coefficients.  I felt like screaming “You can’t handle the math’ but my team told me not to get mad or try to be funny.  That would happen naturally.  They threw 99% of the technical models out the door and said it was a big flood and no one was responsible.  It was an Act of God.  Force Majeure.   It would have happened anyway.  They were not wrong.

 

When the trial came, we threw all the technical stuff out the window and after getting the jury to like me, (they have to like you) I looked them in the eye and told them, “ You live here and were here for this storm and you know that was not a 20 year storm as proposed by the plaintiff, or a 100 year storm as required by the state, it was an Act of God.”  They liked my casual Bola tie and my professorial ponytail and agreed with me.  After two hours of deliberation, they completely exonerated the defense of any wrongdoing.  The other side had to pay the legal fees. 

 

The moral of the story is consistent communication and calibration of your client and your audience as well as your data and model is the key to elegant yet robust problem solving.  Start with what answer you want to find and who and how you want to communicate it.  Then back up and perform a minimal tool analysis, like they do for dam work in wilderness areas.  Sometimes pack-horses are more efficient than helicopters when fixing dams in high places.  What is the least complicated way of arriving at the desired solution.  What are the requirements, what are the limitations, what are the desired results.  Often the most elegant solution is the simplest – Occam’s Razor.  Robust models have their place, but make sure it is necessary, fitting and proper.  Don’t use a bazooka to kill a mosquito, even if you want to, and even if you can.

 

Pace Yourself - Olympic Park City

 

We were out on our new, used carbon road bikes the other day cruising along on our fine machines and hammering hills.  We were getting back into a sport we had collectively logged almost one hundred thousand miles on but had forgot about it because of bad bikes and other options.  We were even thinking that a good road bike is about as efficient as a bad e-bike.  Then this guy passed us on a slick new bike like we were standing still and a short while later a woman passed us, and I think she was talking on the phone. 

We were embarrassed for a moment and then we remembered where we were.  Olympic Park City.  Everyone here is in great shape and shreds no matter if it is skiing, biking or Pickleball.  It is the reason most of us came here, extreme recreation and the ‘quality of life’ thing that keeps score by how many days you spend playing outside or on vacation in someplace challenging and exotic.

We didn’t feel so bad, after a while, knowing that there are gold medal winners out there training or elite competitive bikers on the road and in the woods.  They have $10,000 bikes and million-dollar quads with their designer kits and matching shoes.  Who can keep up with that?  No one.  Because we don’t have to. 

I was skate-skiing one day, thinking that I had it down until Bill DeMong zoomed by and left me in the dust, like I was standing still.  No matter what you do or how well you do it, there is always someone here who can do it ten times better.  It’s almost like playing Hockey with Wayne Gretzky.  I remember beating Cindi Schwandt to a finish line one year and she said ‘congratulations Matt but the pros had to do another lap’ and she took off up the hill while I gasped for breath.

So, the key is to just go out and do things at your own pace, on your own level.  Compete with your friends and yourself but never compete with age.  It is just not equivalent, equitable or fair.  I remember smugly latching on to a peloton of older riders in Ireland when I was young and touring with light packs.  They all gave me a look as I moved up the line and a hoot and a holler when I took a turn at the front before flaming out and getting ignominiously dropped.

A lady in Belgium told me one rainy day that we only get so many beats to our hearts in this life and if I waste them riding around Europe, I will pass early.  I said we don’t look at it that way.  But maybe we should, a little. I’ve had more than a few doctors tell me, when asked what went wrong with my body, ‘it's just worn out’.  Elite athletes have a markedly higher rate of A-fib, even Kareem.  So, I take it with a grain of salt, these ideas of eastern and western medicine where we want to be fit but we don’t want to get worn out or hurt.  I’ve adopted moderate exercise in a town of obsessive Olympians.  It’s OK.  We don’t have to compete or win.  We just want to get out.  We just want to play.  Moderation not mediocrity.

I had a Rasta-Jamaican caddy named Raphael at a fancy golf club in New York who, after watching me struggle to play with my friends, said ‘just play your own game man – don’t worry about the others’.  And so I did.  We had a grand time in the woods and the water and forgot to keep score.  I bought that wise man a Red Stripe beer when we were done.  So, remember my friends to get out and play your own game.  Moderation in everything, including moderation.

Oh Canada

 

Lately we have been going to western Canada.  A lot, in all seasons.  Not to avoid the draft or escape the insurrection, but to beat the crowds at our National Parks and on our Park City Streets. We go to chill out and relax in a big land full of huge mountains and glacial valleys with few people, lots of trees, little towns, big lakes, ice castles, hot springs, low temps and deep snow.  It’s like having a foreign country right next door with funny money, words, accents and customs.  Exactly like that.  But it’s clean and close, inclusive and inviting, safe and comfortable, affordable and affable.  Like Switzerland, but you can drive there. 

Sure, it can be cold in winter.  Wicked cold.  It’s usually below zero, oftentimes well below zero, sometimes 40 below (F and C!).  But it’s a dry cold and usually manageable.  It can even be hot in the summer.  They have a desert valley below Kelowna, in the rain shadow of the coastal range, where they grow wine and fruit.  They have lakes and big water.  The Columbia River starts up there, among other major rivers, with lots of dams and hydro power.  The lakes have free ferries that are not crowded and don’t require reservations.  Check availability in the winter.

The Canadian dollars are called Loonies, like the bird, and Twonies, like two birds,  with a good dollar exchange rate (0.7) and there is good value there for your money.  They are metric, like the rest of the world and like we should be, with almost 0.7 km/mile.  Gas is taxed more to cover the actual costs and promote conservation at $1.75 a liter or $7 a gallon. So, between the money, miles and gas, you learn to multiply by 7 very quickly.   Camping is cheap and reservations are recommended but you can always find a spot.  Cheap hotels are less than $100 a night, good ones are $150 and classic ones are $200 so if you don’t camp, lodging is reasonable. 

Canada's infrastructure has been much improved lately.  No longer do you take a two-lane, traffic-signaled highway through downtown Calgary to get to the hills.  There are freeways and belt routes and even a Banff bypass to get you up the canyon.  And once in the canyon there is no pass to go over to get to Banff or Lake Louise.  West of there is Kicking Horse pass to Golden and then Roger’s pass to Revelstoke, which are formidable, even in the summer.  From there to Whistler are some wild coastal mountains and crazy roads that are in good condition.  The Powder Highway from the Idaho-Montana border connects a dozen large and small ski resorts but beware, in some places they do not plow the roads at night!  There are many border crossings that are open at various times so check their web page and if you are civil, they won’t hassle you.

And so, we go there in the summer too, and it is not crowded.  There are more people in California than Canada and it is the second largest country in the world, by area behind Russia, which is almost twice as big.  We have ten times as many people as they do in our slightly smaller country.  90 percent of Canadiens live within 100 miles of the US border which means the rest of the place is wide open.  It’s like North Dakota with trees.  The people are polite to a fault and their favorite saying is ‘soorry’.  The vibe is friendly and inclusive, and they are curious about us.  Canadiens think we are all rich, a little crazy and slightly immoral.  Some think our politics are nuts and that we want to take over their country for their natural resources, free medical care and the pleasant low-key vibe.  I never thought about it, but it’s not a bad idea.