Speaker A [00:00:13]:
If you opened the New York Times during the spring runoff a couple years ago, you may have opened to a picture of today's guest standing against a backdrop of high water on the Missouri river. That article opened with this line. There were no good choices for John Remus, yet he had to choose now. Journalism is a different sort of writing than, say, scientific peer review. Journalists aren't just looking for information. There's a reason they call their pieces stories. They're looking for characters, people who embody ideas and themes. And as soon as I saw John's picture in the New York Times, I knew why he was there. I don't know anyone who embodies the process and history and complicated management tradeoffs of the Missouri river better than John Remus. And if you combine his unfiltered, no nonsense, straight talking wisdom with a warm, thoughtful, personal style, I figure it took the New York Times about 35 seconds to figure out they had their protagonist. Heres how the article describes johns current position few people hold sway over as much water as Mister Remus, chief of the Corps of Engineers, Missouri river basin Water Management division. His decisions affect the lives of countless communities and ecosystems, the cities, factories, and power plants that draw water from the river, the endangered species that nest on its sandbars, the farmers who cultivate its flood plains, and I guess you could say if a quote machine like John Remus is good enough for the New York Times, then surely we'd want him on this little podcast. But while the Times article makes a fun intro, it actually has very little to do with why I invited him on the pod. There was a point in my career where literally everything I knew about our nation's longest river, a river with so much historic sediment load, it's nicknames, the big Muddy. Literally everything I knew about that river came from conversations with John, and he might be a big deal in the clearwater world right now. But for years he ran the corps of Engineers only branch dedicated to sedimentation, a branch that seems to me has generated more sediment transport and river mechanics talent over the years than any other core shop.

Speaker B [00:02:10]:
And so I wanted to talk to.

Speaker A [00:02:11]:
John about Missouri river morphology and mentoring to kind of see if we could unpack some of the big ideas that helped him develop such a deep bench of sediment and river mechanics practitioners in the Omaha district over the years. But all of that is in addition to the main reason John was a non negotiable first season guest on this podcast. He leads a team of sediment and river process subject matter experts from all around the Corps of engineers that deploys to help core districts that encounter sedimentation problems. And you could say that the person who leads that team, well, it's kind of on brand for this podcast. So on this episode of the RSM River Mechanics podcast, a conversation with the chair of the Corps of Engineers River Engineering committee, John Remus.

Speaker B [00:02:56]:
John Remus, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker C [00:02:59]:
Thank you, Stan. Glad to be here.

Speaker B [00:03:00]:
So, John, how did it turn out that you ended up spending your whole career on the Missouri river?

Speaker C [00:03:05]:
In 1985, I graduated with my master's degree from the University of Nebraska and was going to spend one year, I was going to end up working for ch two m hill building sewage treatment plants in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker B [00:03:15]:
All right, that sounds like a 20 year old thing to do.

Speaker C [00:03:18]:
Go see the world, right?

Speaker B [00:03:19]:
That's right. That's right.

Speaker C [00:03:20]:
So I was going to take this job for a year working in the river and reservoir engineering section at the Omaha district. And in that first year, I got to see the Missouri river from Fort Peck, Montana, all the way to the mouth. I got to go to urtic, was called the waterways Experiment station there at that time, where I met a lot of very bright people in river engineering, hydraulic engineering, and I got to go to HEC for a training class. And it finally dawned on me that I really kind of liked this work. I liked the people I was working with, and I could make a career out of it. So that's how I started here, and that's how I ended up spending 30 plus years.

Speaker B [00:04:00]:
Is the Missouri river the longest river in the country, or is it just a tributary of the Mississippi?

Speaker C [00:04:08]:
We could discuss this with the Mississippi guys all you want, but the Missouri river is the longest river in the country, about 20 miles longer than the Mississippi river, and it would be even longer if the corps hadn't cut 75 miles out of it. So we gave them a fighting chance. There it is, the longest river, and I think it's probably one of the most diverse watersheds that you'll find anywhere on the planet, geologically, geographically, hydrologically. It's very diverse.

Speaker B [00:04:37]:
So when I joined the corps, my introduction to the Missouri river is you explained to me it's a river that can be thought of in thirds. And that's always been my working mental map for the Missouri river ever since. So can you describe to us the thirds of the Missouri river?

Speaker C [00:04:53]:
Well, it really goes back to the development of the Missouri River, a river of thirds. The lower 735 miles of the river itself is channelized into a self scouring navigation channel, that's one of the thirds. The other third is about a third of the river's length, is impounded in reservoirs, mostly a Missouri corps of engineers mainstream reservoirs. There's a few other privately owned reservoirs in Montana. And then the other third is quasi natural. As far as, particularly from a river channel point of view, of course, the hydrology is no longer anywhere near natural. That's why it's a river of thirds.

Speaker B [00:05:32]:
So, Kansas City district, we've got this self scouring channel then really like five of the biggest reservoirs in the country, and then upstream of that, more of a natural system.

Speaker C [00:05:44]:
Well, the natural system is kind of spread upstream and then between the reservoirs.

Speaker B [00:05:47]:
Between the reservoirs a little bit.

Speaker C [00:05:49]:
Garrison Owy and Fort Peck are the third, fourth, and fifth largest storage reservoirs in the federal portfolio. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are larger on the Colorado river. And there's a reason for that, that they're that huge and where they're at.

Speaker B [00:06:05]:
Yeah. A qualitative cutoff for if a reservoir is really big. If you're zoomed out to the United States and Google Earth, can you still see the reservoir? Your reservoirs, you can definitely see from.

Speaker C [00:06:16]:
Space, and they're big like that. Just the design of the system. The reservoir system was designed to serve its authorized purposes through periods of high runoff or flooding, as well as periods of extended severe drought, which the Missouri river basin is subject to long, severe droughts. The dust bowl drought from 1930 through 1941 is what our conservation or our multipurpose carryover pool is designed to provide service for those uses during a very long, very severe drought.

Speaker B [00:06:51]:
But they also provided a lot of buffer for the big floods that we've had recently.

Speaker C [00:06:56]:
Yeah, they do provide a substantial amount of flood control for floods that we've seen since the system filled in. 19 67 75 flood 8483-9397 211 2019 I mean, there's big floods that while they're still flooding, it does provide a substantial benefit.

Speaker B [00:07:17]:
So what percentage of the Mississippi watershed and flow is the Missouri?

Speaker C [00:07:22]:
Well, land wise, the Missouri makes up about 45 46% of the Mississippi river watershed land wise. So it's about half the land at St. Louis. If you look at the long term daily averages, the Missouri river puts in about half. Of course, New Orleans is quite a bit less than that because you got the Ohio and the Arkansas and those rivers coming in, but it's very variable. Seldom do you have coincidental flooding or coincidental droughts. And when they are having a severe drought on the upper Mississippi basin at St. Louis, the Missouri river may be providing 80% of the flow, which is very significant.

Speaker B [00:08:06]:
So on average, we're talking about half at St. Louis and less than half downstream on average. But my understanding is that the Missouri has supplied more than half of the sediment historically. How does that work?

Speaker C [00:08:18]:
Historically, yes. Historically, the Missouri river supplied about 70% to 80% of the sediment entering the gulf pre development.

Speaker B [00:08:27]:
So, well, less than half of the water, but 70% to 80% of the same.

Speaker C [00:08:31]:
Right. It's a lot. It was the big muddy.

Speaker B [00:08:33]:
The big muddy.

Speaker C [00:08:34]:
Too thick to drink, too thin to plow, was the saying. So it was. And even today, it's still a significant amount of sediment at St. Louis. But through development within the Missouri river basin and the other portions of the Mississippi river basin, the total sediment load passing New Orleans is, well, less than half of what it was historically. And now the Missouri river only puts in about half of that diminished load. Which brings to you, when it comes to sediment management or addressing sedimentation issues, is that because sediment is not an instantaneous impact, you build a project, a dam, a levee, a channel cutoff, the sediment impacts take time to appear and they take a long time to mature. So you can't point an event and say, aha, that's the silver bullet. That's the culprit. There's a collective thing throughout the entire greater Mississippi river basin. When you're looking at sedimentation in New Orleans, you have to consider time amounts, the change in hydrology, the whole nine yards, because if you don't consider that, you may implement a solution that really leads to another problem or a greater problem.

Speaker B [00:09:54]:
So if you get rainfall in Montana, you know that it'll be weeks, days or weeks or months or months if you see water downstream. But the sediment impacts, that can be years or decades.

Speaker C [00:10:09]:
Years or decades, yes. Well, we've seen, just recently, we've had huge floods, one in 2011, another massive, long lasting flood in 2019, which we saw almost instant changes in the channel degradation as sediment was swept out of the system by those huge floods. We saw a slow recovery and then another flood come along. But some of the other impacts of that are not going to be felt for another decade or two.

Speaker B [00:10:43]:
So, speaking of the floods, John Shelley and I, we wrote a paper on the downstream effects in Kansas City reach during those two floods. In the big floods that we've seen, including 93, the Missouri river aggressively erodes and then deposits almost the same amount in the floodplain. But over the following years, you get rebound. Maybe not complete rebound, but you get rebound, and that's a pretty predictable pattern we've seen downstream. How has the upstream section responded to the floods?

Speaker C [00:11:11]:
Well below the system, below Gavin's point, we see that same thing. We've seen just a general trend of degradation as both the trapping of the sediment and projects on the tributaries. The bank stabilization and navigation project sequesters a lot of sediment there. We see a response to a large discharge from our reservoirs or a large flood. The degradation, and then a slow rebound, but we don't get 100% rebound. There's still just a general degradation trend upstream of our reservoirs. The issue with flooding is that we'll get an inflow of sediment, either from a tributary or the main stem, into the delta area, and then we'll have a period of adjustment where the river will have to find its new quasi equilibrium through that sediment, but it's not causing necessarily a long term problem yet, and that we accounted for sedimentation in our reservoirs. We knew it was going to happen. And strangely enough, with very little data, the engineers that calculated that were pretty spot on.

Speaker B [00:12:15]:
That's impressive.

Speaker C [00:12:17]:
Incredibly impressive.

Speaker B [00:12:18]:
When were one of those reservoirs built?

Speaker C [00:12:20]:
Well, Fort Peck was built in the 1930s, but the other five were authorized in 44 and built in the fifties, through the sixties.

Speaker B [00:12:28]:
So we have engineers in the forties fifties making sediment transport projections that have.

Speaker C [00:12:34]:
Held up sediment yield, that have. Gavin's pointed curve almost follows a predicted one. It is amazing.

Speaker B [00:12:40]:
That's remarkable. How full is Gavin's?

Speaker C [00:12:43]:
Well, Gavin's point is from a total volume. It's over 25% fall.

Speaker B [00:12:49]:
So the reservoir is. A quarter of it is taken up with.

Speaker C [00:12:54]:
It is the smallest, by far the smallest reservoir in the system.

Speaker B [00:12:57]:
It's a small reservoir by Missouri standards, but not by national standards.

Speaker C [00:13:01]:
It's a giant reservoir, 400,000 acre feet. Right?

Speaker B [00:13:05]:
So 25% of Gavin's would fill most of the reservoirs in America.

Speaker C [00:13:11]:
That's, as I said earlier, the big three, we call them, are the third, fourth, and fifth largest, and they're huge. The total system storage is about 72.4 million acre feet, which is by far the most storage in any system in North America. And it's that way for a reason.

Speaker B [00:13:27]:
So how did the corps get involved in the Missouri river? What were, like, some of the first, like, core missions on the Missouri?

Speaker C [00:13:34]:
The first core mission was the corps of discovery.

Speaker B [00:13:36]:
Oh, wow.

Speaker C [00:13:37]:
Lewis and Clark in 1804 through 1806. That was actually a corps of engineers.

Speaker B [00:13:42]:
Lewis and Clark.

Speaker C [00:13:43]:
Lewis and Clark. Clark was an engineer and a surveyor, which I find amazing is that he surveyed the Missouri river. If you take landmarks out there, like Pompey's pillar on the Yellowstone river, and you plot it today, it's within feet of where we would put it today with all of the technology we have. I mean, his maps were amazing.

Speaker B [00:14:04]:
That's unbelievable.

Speaker C [00:14:05]:
Unbelievable. I mean, he's out there with a sextant compass.

Speaker B [00:14:09]:
Right. Embarrassed.

Speaker C [00:14:13]:
So, you know, the cliffs, the white cliffs on the Missouri river, you know, he had them about. That's, as I find, amazing. That was our first, if you want to call intervention.

Speaker B [00:14:22]:
Yeah, right.

Speaker C [00:14:23]:
But any real physical type stuff didn't begin until the mid 1850s, as the homestead act hit out there, and people were moving out here. And it really consisted of very site specific stuff. Some improvements around some of the ports, Kansas City, Omaha, some of the military outposts, fort Pier, and then, of course, clearing and snagging. The corps of Engineers was out there taking trees out of the way of the navigators there. But our real engineering interventions really didn't start until the. The 20th century.

Speaker B [00:14:56]:
But there was navigation. It was a navigable river in the 18 hundreds.

Speaker C [00:15:00]:
Oh, yes. It was the way to get goods out into the upper great plains. They navigated all the way to Fort Benton, Montana, which is just downstream of Great Falls.

Speaker B [00:15:10]:
So the Omad district, as long as I've been in the core, has had unusual concentration of sediments. And river engineering specialists, that makes a lot of sense if you're managing a river called the big muddy and you have reservoirs and a navigation channel, that you would want to have some river mechanics expertise. But some of the tone or some of the focus of that has changed in the last 20 years. Can you tell us what is a least tern or a pallid sturgeon? And why are they so interesting to sediment transport scientists?

Speaker C [00:15:43]:
Well, we'll start with the birds. Okay. We began managing for them in 1986 when they were. When the tern was listed as endangered and the pipe impoverished, threatened. And what. What they, the birds have to do with sediment is they like barren sediment, barren sand to nest on.

Speaker B [00:16:03]:
In the river?

Speaker C [00:16:04]:
In the river, or on the shoreline of our reservoirs, the plover moor, on the shoreline of the reservoir, they like barren sandbars. They scratch out a nest, they lay their eggs there. The tern will nest high, and they're very territorial. And the tern does that because they feed their young. They go get minnows and insects or whatever. Plovers, on the other hand, they nest close to the water because their chicks have to walk and eat the bugs in the wet sand. So they offer a little bit different challenge, because, you know, if you raise the water a foot, you're probably getting a nest.

Speaker B [00:16:35]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:16:36]:
And they nest from May through August when we're getting a lot of run.

Speaker B [00:16:40]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:16:40]:
Right. It's very challenging to first identify where, where the birds are and then try not to wash the nest away.

Speaker B [00:16:49]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:16:49]:
And sometimes we have to make decisions, you know, do we release water and keep the shoreline available or do we inundate the shoreline and keep the sandbars and the riverine portions available to nest? And usually it's the riverine portion because that's where most of the birds nest, percentage wise. And then there's times where we actually build sandbars for these where we basically dredge, excavate sediment out of the river bottom and just pile it up, which I guess it's a way of sediment management. And through the years there's been people that have said, well, why don't we just manage the sediment with the flow? We'll have a spring pulse, we'll build sandbars.

Speaker B [00:17:35]:
Paul and I modeled that.

Speaker C [00:17:38]:
The non river engineers. Non engineers think, well, this is free. You don't have to spend money building it. It's not free. You're either foregoing flood control or foregoing hydropower or something. Something gives, so it's not necessarily free.

Speaker B [00:17:53]:
Right.

Speaker C [00:17:54]:
As far as the fish goes, is that the hypothesis that we're operating under is that the fish needs a greater diversity of alluvial processes and just river velocities. What we did when we channelized, we kind of turned it into a box that has a uniform velocity.

Speaker B [00:18:13]:
Not a lot of fluvial diversity.

Speaker C [00:18:16]:
Not a lot of fluvial diversity. So that's what we're trying to do with this, is put fluvial diversity back in where it's needed without compromising the other purposes, navigation, flood control, water supply and so on. I've been fortunate enough in my career to have a lot of latitude to experiment in the prototype, build it, monitor it, learn from it. The best lab in the world is the prototype.

Speaker B [00:18:41]:
What are some of the big lessons? What have you learned?

Speaker C [00:18:45]:
Well, I think from the riverine portion of it, for the fish, is that we locked the river down way more than we would have needed to, even to meet the goals of the project back in 1945. And we did some things, we locked it down, we had some what maybe were unintended consequences and then we trapped a little too much sediment. So we have a lot of leeway in opening this up, or relatively a lot of leeway without having to. We won't be compromising these other purposes. We just need to be very careful about when and how we do that. So that's the first lesson. The other one is that the river is not just not the same every day to the people looking at it, the water, right. They don't understand what's going on underneath. The water is different every day, every season.

Speaker B [00:19:33]:
It's a wild, dynamic world under there.

Speaker C [00:19:35]:
Dynamic world, and that you have a few snapshots in time with the data, and you need to use the tools that are available to you. Use your modeling tools, use the data collection analysis tools, but also use your common sense and say, okay, where could this go wrong? And then develop a way to manage the risk. And that's the biggest thing is, okay, yes, there's risk involved in changing anything. How do you manage that risk? What are the indicators? What do you need to measure so that you know, before something bad happens, that it might happen, and you can take a proactive stance to that.

Speaker B [00:20:11]:
You wear a couple hats. In the corps of engineers, you're the chief of the branch, and now in division, it's your kind of day job. But you have this other role in the corps of engineers as the chief of the river engineering committee, which not many people know what that is, but what is the River Engineering committee? John?

Speaker C [00:20:30]:
Well, the Corps of engineers has four standing technical committees, title hydraulics, hydrology, water quality, and the committee on river Engineering. And that's the committee I'm a member of. It's a committee you're a member of. I've been on that committee since 1996 and I'm not sure early, two thousands I became the chair. And what the committees are for. We have two general purposes. One is to further the profession of river engineering through identifying training. And several of our members actually conduct training. They teach classes. You teach a class. Several of our members have taught ad hoc, taught classes, identifying research needs. What was our R and D program? What should we be doing? And some of our members actually do research and then developing guidance and then informing policy. We don't make policy, we just inform that the other half of it is consulting.

Speaker B [00:21:27]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:21:27]:
Which is the part I like.

Speaker B [00:21:29]:
Yes.

Speaker C [00:21:29]:
This is the part where we can go to a district and augment their technical capability, not take over a project and help them with a very special project or a hard project or something. They just maybe don't have all the expertise that they need. And that's what I like the most, because not only do I get to share my expertise and knowledge, I also learn a lot every time I go on one of those projects. That's what the committee is for. I think we do a pretty good job of that. We keep getting invited back.

Speaker B [00:22:02]:
And so it's generally, the committee deploys once a year. What do those deployments look like?

Speaker C [00:22:09]:
Well, they're very variable. We've consulted with the New Orleans district on the old river structure, how to do some modeling there, what they might want to do from a modeling and analysis point of view. We've done urbanization, stream restoration. The most notable one was when we did for the Baltimore district 30 years ago. We've consulted on the sediment control structure below Mount St. Helens, and then we just recently we've been in Maui.

Speaker B [00:22:36]:
That's right.

Speaker C [00:22:37]:
Where we were brought in by the Honolulu district to help them formulate a study on how they may be able to manage sediment on some of these abandoned plantations so that they could protect the reefs, which is a very challenging thing because you're dealing with a lot of really new earth.

Speaker B [00:22:54]:
That's right. That's right.

Speaker C [00:22:55]:
But I think that through the diversity of our particular committee, we were able to provide them a lot of insight as to how they might be able to move forward.

Speaker B [00:23:03]:
That sounds like most of the corps business lines. You feel like the committee has weighed in on most of the corps missions.

Speaker C [00:23:10]:
Navigation channel stabilization, environmental restoration. Yeah, we're not focused on anyone. And through the fact that we do have, and I think a very diverse committee, we have the ability to bring a lot of expertise to bear on just about any type of river engineering or sedimentation problem.

Speaker B [00:23:31]:
I think this is one of the things that has impressed me as being on the committee, because we get to see projects all across the country is that sediment and river mechanics affect any kind of way that humans interact with rivers and that you almost can't interact with the river, whether it be navigation or ecosystem restoration, without having to account for sediment transport and river mechanics?

Speaker C [00:23:53]:
Yes, very much so. Even if you want to have a channel that is quote unquote stable, non changing, you have to understand that Mother Nature is going to change it, or at least try to. And knowing how much sediment is going to be put into that system and how you're going to get it through is very important. And sometimes the most difficult question for people developing a project to answer is, okay, I built the channel. I've this nice trapezoidal thing. What's it going to look like ten years, 20 years, 50 years from now? Am I going to be able to keep that? Or worse yet, is it going to get bigger?

Speaker B [00:24:29]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:24:30]:
Have we altered this to the point where it's going to become a canyon. And then what do we do? Because that got our flood control. But we've introduced a whole new set of problems.

Speaker B [00:24:40]:
I have this bit about the river engineering committee. When I kind of tell people what it is, is I say, well, we have these sediment experts all over the country, and once a year John Remus sounds the bell and we all converge on the worst sediment problem in the corps of engineers. It's kind of like. It's like the Avengers. We're the sediment Avengers. And I'm not sure who, what that makes you. People have said, I'm Tony Stark because I'm the leg modeling guy. How do you choose who gets a visit from the sediment avengers?

Speaker C [00:25:10]:
Well, the selection process for our, we call it a meeting. I generally pull the hydrologic engineering branch chiefs across the country and say, hey, do you have a problem that you would like us to come help you with? We don't try to insinuate ourselves into any particular issue, necessarily. I'll get anywhere from three to 20 projects and we'll sit down as a committee and evaluate which one of these really can we help? And it has to be a problem where they really need our help. And then it has to be in a project, has to be in a position where we can intervene. It can't be too early in the process where they can't share enough information with us, where we can provide them good advice or too late where they can't change if they're, you know, so we try to pick one out that says, you know, hey, I think we can help you here. So we try to do that. And I think we've been really successful in the last 15 years of picking out projects where we can go in, provide the district some good assistance, help them maybe fill in a spot in their particular technical expertise that they may not have or not have enough of, and help them get over a hump into the next step. And like I said, we keep getting invited back, so we must be doing something right.

Speaker B [00:26:27]:
But this is remarkable because when I was a young guy in the district, obviously you could fill rooms with things I didn't know about the corps. But this is one of the things I didn't know about the corps, is that even as like a 23 year old engineer, if I was facing a sediment problem that was a real challenge to my district. I could potentially, at no cost to the district, have eight sediment and river mechanics experts come and consult for a week and help set a direction for the project.

Speaker C [00:26:58]:
We can do that, and we may not even do a visit where we have in the past just gotten together on a conference call and said, hey, here's some things you might want to try. That's right. Or we may have one or two of our members of our committee just set a day set with couple of the people from the district and say, you know, here's how you can maybe build a model that can help you gain some insight into this or go out and collect these data and this will help you.

Speaker B [00:27:30]:
It's kind of a special forces unit within the corps of engineers to help with these kinds of problems.

Speaker A [00:27:37]:
It's available.

Speaker C [00:27:38]:
It's available.

Speaker B [00:27:39]:
Okay, so that's actually a great segue because I. So I've been on the committee for about 15 years and until last year I was the junior member of the committee. We added Calvin Creech, who might be 18 months younger than me, but I'm no longer the junior member of the committee. But for 15 years as the junior member of the committee I said to my supervisor that the biggest contributor to my personal professional and technical development has just been going out into a field with you and Meg Jonas and Freddie Pinker and Mike Spoordhenness and looking at a sediment problem being present as you break a problem down to first principles and then build it back up to possible solutions. And it occurred to me that even though I've always thought of you as the lead of the committee, you probably had a time when you were the junior member of the committee and there were other people who were the people on the committee that you learned for Ramen. What were some of the things you learned?

Speaker C [00:28:34]:
That's very similar to my growth in the committee. My first committee meeting was Lisa Creek in La district. And we had on the committee Ron Copeland, who was at Erdic at the time, a very good designer slash modeler, knew that side of the business. Tom Pokrefke, who was maybe the last great movable bed physical modeler that the corps had. And he really knew how to understand river mechanics at the very base level. Tom Munson, who was actually headquarters at the time, but you know, had just this vast. He'd worked almost everywhere on the planet in Rivers. Ed Singh, who was at the division office in San Francisco, he was an LA district h and H branch chief formerly. So they, he had a lot of, you know, design channels, urban channel type there. And then of course, Mike Spohr, who's still on the committee. I just like talking with Mike. Mike's a national about anything. He's a brilliant geotechnical engineer by education, geology by education, but just understands just at the very base level. And his approach is keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate the problem. Don't overcomplicate an already complicated problem.

Speaker B [00:29:59]:
You think back to some of those early meetings, the things that you found surprising or like, are there some principles that you still kind of guide the way you think about problems now?

Speaker C [00:30:09]:
Yes, I think it gets into a little bit, like I just said about Mike, is, you know, rivers can be very complicated and we tend to overthink things. Keep it simple, get it down to just the basic elements of it. And that was very helpful for me when we started adding this diversity to the river that we've talked about. And I said, okay, let's just get it down to what's actually going a, b and c, right. Let's not overcomplicate. That was the basic thing. And then just picking their brains about, as you said, standing in a field and then just in the evening talking about projects, this project, that project, very, very helpful.

Speaker B [00:30:53]:
So what I'm hearing you say, and this has kind of been my experience as well, is don't get too bogged down in the details of this particular situation. What are the fundamental river mechanics principles that apply everywhere that can play here?

Speaker C [00:31:08]:
Well, I think the mechanics are you have what you have in your, basically your sediment transports, equates, sheer strength, all these types of things which you need to understand. You need to understand a little bit of if you're using a particular equation, you know, how did that come to be? You don't have to get into the research and read all of the papers on it, but understand why, why that would, might apply here. And then kind of understand how a drop of water or a grain of sediment originates in a basin and gets to the, gets to the mouth of that basin.

Speaker B [00:31:42]:
Right.

Speaker C [00:31:42]:
What path does it take? So you need to, you know, have a. A little bit of an understanding. And I tell every young engineer that I ever mentored is go look at what you're doing. Understand that you're not going to see everything, but be aware of if it's a site specific problem, what's coming in, what's going out. Just get a feel for that and stand on the bank. If you can wade out into, if the river is shallow enough, do, do that. Kind of understand. Get a picture on that day, what it looks like and then go back, you know, after an event of some sort and see what's changed.

Speaker B [00:32:22]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:32:23]:
Visualize that in your mind.

Speaker B [00:32:25]:
Right. Build your morphological intuition right.

Speaker C [00:32:27]:
Intuition there. And then, you know, use the tools. If you're able to build a model, if you have the data, you have the ability build one, figure out what the sensitivities are of that model and, and then take that information and apply it through this understanding that you've built, knowing that there is no one answer to a sediment transport. There is a family of answers. All of them could be right, all of them could be wrong from a absolute point of view.

Speaker B [00:32:58]:
Right. Then. The other thing I heard you say that reflects my experience on the committee is you can ask the question, what other projects are like this? What are the comps essentially? And I see that a lot is that when we come to a problem or especially a proposed solution, someone will say, oh, this is a lot like, and we'll start to build comps, other systems that are like this. And how did they respond to give us a sense of, well, how might this respond to this intervention or engineering measure that we're the proposing? And a lot of times we already kind of know that it's not a great idea or could work out.

Speaker C [00:33:36]:
Right. And that I think that gets back to, you know, when we, when we look at our committee membership. Yeah, we want, and this is something that Jerry Webb, when he asked me to be the committee chair, we'd kind of gotten monotonic in our, in our membership. We, we were all of the same mind and he wanted to change that. And he said, I want to get a little more diversity. And his first, not diversity like we talk about in the social sense, but diversity of expertise, experience, diversity of skills. You know, he wanted to have some modelers, he wanted to have data, people that could data. And he wanted to have big river, small river. So our first goal in the committee is to have the technical diversity. The second goal is to have the geographic diversity. So we went there and I think that that's why you can bring in these comps, is that if we're in a, something in the middle of La Prado was an example of that. We have people that are familiar with that. We also have people from Detroit that said, well, we have something similar in the upper peninsula that might apply here or we have something in Seattle district or someplace.

Speaker B [00:34:47]:
I feel like our agency has been around long enough that it's a question we should be asking more is have we built something like this before and what happened?

Speaker C [00:34:58]:
But we have been around and we really started nationwide with the corps in the early part of the 20th century, building system, wide water resources, infrastructure, whether it's navigation or hydropower or flood control, whatever. And hopefully we've got 100 years of knowledge that we haven't lost, but it's.

Speaker B [00:35:21]:
Distributed, so you actually have to do some work to get to it.

Speaker C [00:35:25]:
And that's another thing of the committee. We have somebody in the Detroit district. We need that person to kind of bring all the knowledge of the Detroit district with him or her.

Speaker B [00:35:36]:
This is a role of the committee that I haven't thought of before, but it's essentially an internal learning institution, an institution within the institution that tries to coalesce the lessons learned and then makes them available.

Speaker C [00:35:49]:
Yeah, it's part of our mission, the training, the education part of it.

Speaker B [00:35:56]:
Something else I've heard you talk about is that maybe we should be changing the timescales that we think about these problems on.

Speaker C [00:36:03]:
Yes, definitely. We have our human timescale, which is a lifetime. I had a college professor that said the reason why we managed at a hundred year flood is because most engineers don't live to be 100.

Speaker B [00:36:17]:
It doesn't seem like the best way to think about it.

Speaker C [00:36:20]:
That was his philosophy. And he may be even, right?

Speaker B [00:36:23]:
Oh, I think he might be, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C [00:36:25]:
And then we have almost our economic timescale, which is even shorter than a lifetime. And then you have what I would call generational timescales. I mean, our projects, a lot of them that we build are. They're going to outlive me, they're going to outlive you. They're going to outlive the next generation by a long time. So what do we do with these projects? We don't want a bunch of white elephants out there. And then you've got Mother Nature's time scale, geological time scale. So we need to start thinking about these things, our projects, in what I think a larger time scale, both in our operation of them and our planning of them, so that we don't lose what we have gained.

Speaker B [00:37:06]:
This seems connected to what you were saying at the very beginning about how sediment timescales are longer than hydrologic timescales. And so when we build a project that's going to have a sediment impact, the impact will unfold on the multidecadal scale.

Speaker C [00:37:23]:
Right, right. And it's slow. We as engineers, we kind of think in process. Hopefully we're thinking in process time. But a lot of people think in what I call snapshot time, and they relate. You know, it was like this ten years ago. Now it's like this. We had a flood last year. Obviously, that was the, the problem. In fact, the flood occupies such a small times in that decade that it really didn't have an impact. It may have did. But we have to understand the process and how long things take. A drop of water from Fort Peck, Montana, to St. Louis takes weeks. A grain of sand from Kansas City to St. Louis takes years. So that's what we're dealing with when we talk about sediment is that it's an order of magnitude. Sometimes the lag effect and sometimes even greater than that. The other part of it is once we make a change to a system, whether it's channelization or a dam or a levee, we're going to have to deal with that impact down the road. Something is going to change because the river changes. It lives, it breathes, it reacts. So the status quo is not static. And I think our planning process assumes that the status quo is static until it is gone. And then we are going to replace that resource that benefit at a like or cheaper cost somehow. And that's just not the case when it comes to sediment.

Speaker B [00:38:56]:
Yeah, it's like when the Missouri reservoir is filled with sediment, there isn't an opportunity to replace that resource immediately. And so it has to be managed on the like century scale.

Speaker C [00:39:07]:
Right. Which gets to, what do we know now? And what do we need to know now? So that when it comes time to pull a particular trigger, we know what that trigger is and when to do it. And I think that that is where the United States as a whole is really lagging in management of our water resources projects is we don't know enough about when sediment is going to reach that tipping point.

Speaker B [00:39:32]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:39:33]:
And what do we need? When do we need to do what we need to do to prevent that? Because when it's on your doorstep, it's way too late.

Speaker B [00:39:42]:
I feel bad for my daughter because she seems to be interested in what I do for a living. We went to a summer camp, and as each kid came out, they said some fact about them. And so as my daughter, she's 13, came out and they said, and when she grows up, she wants to study water and soil. And the person behind me was like, how do you get a job doing that? What's that job? But whether or not she becomes an engineer or not, my daughter as a 45 year old practicing river mechanics engineer has become this character in my imagination. I want her to be proud of the decisions I made. We're talking many years down the line. Decades. But I want her to say, dad didn't have all the information, but he made good decisions to put me in a good position. Not the decisions that were politically expedient at the time.

Speaker C [00:40:34]:
Yeah, well, you just said another four letter word. Political, I think always, and I think even more so now. People want instant results. After the flood of 2019, I heard a lot of not just politicians, but people within our organization saying, we need to make sure this never happens again. And I want to say, do you know God?

Speaker B [00:40:58]:
Because that's the only phone call you can make.

Speaker C [00:41:01]:
Other than that, it's got. There will be a bigger flood that will overtop the levees, that will exceed the capacity of our particular control measures. Maybe it will happen next year. It might not happen for a thousand years, but it's going to happen. So you need to just be aware that we as human beings, while we can influence the environment, our ability to control the environment is pretty limited, particularly when it comes to water. Man made infrastructure will wear out and the capacity will be exceeded. That's a fact of life. So, as you said, we need to make wise decisions now so that we don't bootstrap future generations to the point where they can't make a. A good decision, where they're only. We don't want to leave them with only bad options. I think sometimes that we look, our planning horizon is maybe 50 years when, in fact, there's been a lot of work done that you, when it comes to sediment, you cannot replace that resource, that value that and that. Maybe we shouldn't be discounting those future benefits.

Speaker B [00:42:06]:
Right. Because it's not replaceable in that 50 year time scale. Okay, so the main hats you wear in the corps of Engineers are as the Missouri guy and the chair of the river engineering committee. But, like, one kind of subtle thing that I feel like I've watched over the course of the years is Omaha district has always been known to have this concentration of high quality sediment transport and river mechanics practitioners. Part of that's your big district, and you have a lot of sediment work, and nothing builds to practitioners like good work. And part of that is that you actually had a reservoir sedimentation branch. I think that you have really good hiring and retention practices that we've talked about at some point. But I also think that part of that is just that you and Dan Prudh, who is the current chief of that branch, really take mentoring very seriously and really invest in younger engineers. And that's kind of one of my goals for this podcast would be just to give people outside the Omaha district just a little bit of scalable access to that mentoring. And so I guess what I'd like to wrap up with here are, what are some of the things that you've found helpful to share with or help develop younger engineers in sediment transport and river mechanics?

Speaker C [00:43:21]:
Well, I think the first thing when we're talking about hiring someone into our river and reservoir engineering section, which is, that's where you get in entry level is people that are interested in those types of things. Interesting about Paul Boyd. He's an agricultural engineer who owns a patent for an anhydrous thing. That was his. He impressed our then branch chief when they was just walking through the halls of the Iowa State ag engineering department. And Paul likes to solve problems. And that's really the basic thing. Do you like to solve problems and are you ready for the challenge of a difficult problem? That's the first thing. And then you touched on it, the good work. Get them in, give them something challenging, and then support them with whatever training you can get them mentoring. You know, if it's, if it's not here, do they need to go set a week in Vicksburg or out at Hec? You know, do they need to, you know, go there, do it? Yeah, you know, it's an investment. You have to invest in the people. As an organization, we need to promote more of that. Formal training is important. Learning how to run the models is very important. But learning how to use the models is really what you get from mentoring.

Speaker B [00:44:32]:
Right. So what are some of the things, like, if you think about over the course of being in the cubicle, because you have cubicles here of some of these younger engineers, what are some of the themes that you kind of find yourself going back to again and again of like, okay, this is the way you need to think about this?

Speaker C [00:44:51]:
Well, I think it gets back to, do you really understand what's going on in the prototype on a, on a base level, not on a quantitative level, more of a qualitative level. Have you done some research over what's been past reports, past studies? Have you looked at data? Do you kind of get a feel for how sediment's moving through this particular area?

Speaker B [00:45:14]:
Do you have a conceptual model in your head before you start moving numbers.

Speaker C [00:45:20]:
Around and then build your steady, your analysis plan off of that basic conceptual model in your head? Be patient. It's not going to come fast. Somebody's going to. And there's going to be gaps. There's going to be gaps in your conceptual model where you say, I don't know if I know enough. There's going to certainly be gaps in our modeling capability. No model is 100% going to give you all of the answers exactly as you want. And mother nature is never going to give you the model flood anyway. So understand that you know, and learn to live in the gray, and then don't be afraid to, a, ask for help, and b, don't be afraid to be the expert. If you have a project and you are the most knowledgeable person on that project, be the most knowledgeable person on that project. Share your knowledge, and then people will ask you questions and you will just learn. It's, it's kind of like how the committee operates. We ask questions, we learn and exchange of information.

Speaker B [00:46:22]:
There's a section in one of the podcasts I enjoy called overrated or underrated, where the guest lays out some things and asks if the host lays out some things and asks if the guest thinks they're overrated or underrated. Modeling. Overrated or underrated?

Speaker C [00:46:41]:
I think it's probably a little overrated. And let me explain that. Of course, there's the saying is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. I don't agree with that. I think that a model is a representation of the prototype, whether it's a river model or a model airplane. And if you're going to apply what you learn in a model to the prototype, you have to have some insight. It is not the silver bullet. So I think it's overrated in that sense, and that modelers trust the model. The model told me this. Well, the model told you this, but what does that tell you about the prototype in that sense? It's overrated. I think that our modeling, in my 35 plus years here, our ability to model has grown exponentially. Our models are far more powerful than they ever were before. I mean, what we do on a PC now used to take minutes on a mainframe. Our ability to collect, analyze data is, in the last decade, is orders of magnitude greater. And it's quality data. It's not just garbage data, it's really quality data. So, you know, so you have to have the ability to process that. And models give us that, but you still have to have the, is this really the picture? Have I modeled the right sample? Have I collected the right samples? And had a water quality specialist that worked in our section for years? We would ask him questions, and he would say, do you want me to find it or not find it? He was, I can build you a modeling sampling plan to find it, not find it. Tell me what they, tell me the answer you want, and I will sample accordingly. Of course, we can never trust him to do that, because he would usually do whatever the hell he wanted. But that was. That was John's approach. He goes, I can sample to find the problem or I can sample that. There is no problem. And you can do that with sediment. You can sample to find a problem.

Speaker B [00:48:35]:
Or model to find a problem or.

Speaker C [00:48:36]:
Model to not find a problem. So you. And sometimes you need to know. But I think models are properly a well constructed model and a properly applied model. And by properly applied is what. What are the limitations of the model? What's the model sensitive to? And is the prototype also sensitive to that?

Speaker A [00:48:55]:
Yes.

Speaker C [00:48:55]:
So knowing that, and then in that sense, all models are right because they're all useful.

Speaker B [00:49:00]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:49:00]:
But knowing that the number, the answer, whether it's water surface elevation or amount of aggradation that you get in the model is not going to be exactly what you see in the prototype because mother nature won't give you that combination of water and sediment.

Speaker B [00:49:15]:
Yeah. Until our conversation, I really hadn't put together that when I was. I'm a modeler. I was added to the team as a modeler. I hadn't really put together that. I used to like to build models when I was a kid. Like, I'd build these little model airplanes and helicopters and, like, the thing about building a model is by the time I got done, the product wasn't very useful. Right? Like, you can't even like, play with it or whatever, but, like, over the course of the hours I spent building an f 14 or a black hawk or whatever, I became very familiar with what that was. I learned about it. And I wish that we would think about modelers, models more that way. Numerical models help us build our conceptual model and test those hypotheses and refine if our conceptual model is wrong, hopefully the numerical model can help us fix it. But when it comes right down to it, it's the engineer that sits in the room or the scientist that sits in the room, and he or she has internalized the sensitivities of the prototype, of the actual system and can answer questions intuitively rather than, you know, this model gives an answer to three decimal points.

Speaker C [00:50:20]:
You know, there are some instances where the number you get out of the model is what we use. Floodplain delineation. Yes, we model it. Here's the elevation. Here's the extent of the floodplain. That's how they regulate. And that's fine. It gives us a point where we can tell people on this side of the line, your risk is less on this side, it's more and inform that. But is the hundred year or the 1% exceedance probability flood exactly there? No. Even on the day, if we had got the flood, the day we collected the data, did the modeling, it's still within that sense, people use models. But if we're designing a project, particularly one that is going to be there for a long time, we need to understand that we know a lot, but there's a lot more that we don't know. The amount that we don't know far exceeds what we know. And that's always going to be the case no matter how far down this understanding we go, because rivers are living, breathing things.

Speaker B [00:51:24]:
Let me wrap up with following up that question, because I have heard you talk about this before, is we're not structural engineers, where everything, it's all just physics. A lot of what we have to deal with in river mechanics and sediment transport is happening in this dynamic subsurface world that we can't see. We're literally blind to our processes except for surveys every ten years or something like that. You spent your career not knowing more than you know. I feel like some people would be very uncomfortable with a career like that. You seem to have enjoyed it. I know I enjoy it. What are your thoughts about living in this world where you have to make definitive decisions in a world with a lot of uncertainty?

Speaker C [00:52:08]:
Well, I think that, first of all, you have to have the type of, I guess, personality where you're comfortable living in gray, where things are not black and white. And I can live there, but I'm not overly stressed out by the fact that I am going to be asked to make a decision based on maybe not perfect information. And the other part of it is understanding where does your risk lie? Okay. In my job, I have now, if I decide to release water, where is that most likely to impact somebody? And how can I communicate that risk so that the people that are there might be able to mitigate that risk. So that's understanding where your uncertainty is. Where your risk may lie is important to that. So that you, when you make decisions, whether it's a design decision or an operational decision, where's our uncertainty and how do we manage that particular risk? And I think sometimes that's where we fall down on when we're building projects like flood control projects, levees, flood control channels, is that we offer our sponsor, our partners, a very definitive answer on something that is still very gray. And we, I think Katrina pointed out that we don't control floods necessarily. We manage flood risk.

Speaker B [00:53:28]:
That's right.

Speaker C [00:53:28]:
And that people should understand that. And flood control is all part of flood risk management, but we need to understand that.

Speaker B [00:53:38]:
So I heard three things. You're going to do your absolute best with everything you have, but you have to be comfortable with a certain probability that you'll be wrong. You need to recognize what are the worst outcomes of being wrong and manage for those. And then you have to communicate that uncertainty and make sure that it doesn't come out as definitive as, say, a structural engineering result.

Speaker C [00:54:03]:
Right. Exactly. And it's very hard. The communication part of it is very hard because while we have 100 year floods across this country every year, they don't happen at the same place every year. And people can go 20 years without being flooded and then be flooded three years in a row. And they're like, well, what's changed?

Speaker B [00:54:25]:
And whose fault is it? Nothing has changed.

Speaker C [00:54:27]:
Mother Nature decided that this year, these three years, this is where we're going to flood. And, you know, people's memories, particularly with flooding, is about five years. They move on to other things. And this has human nature and we can't change that. So the communication part of that is that, you know, you still have residual flood risk or you still have residual water supply risk. Whatever it is, you know, you can do the best you can. But in the end, the capacity of our infrastructure will be exceeded.

Speaker B [00:55:03]:
In some ways, we are stewards of river memory when everyone else forgets.

Speaker C [00:55:08]:
Yes, very much so. And we're dealing with that right now in 2022 with low water during the winter time here. And it's been a long time, it's been 15 years since we've had this type of low water. And several municipalities are saying, well, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong.

Speaker B [00:55:26]:
It's just part of the natural variability that we're living.

Speaker C [00:55:30]:
And those plant operators, people have retired. They moved on. They've got new people that have never experienced it. And they're like, nobody told me.

Speaker B [00:55:38]:
Well, John Remus, thanks so much for taking some time to talk with us today.

Speaker C [00:55:43]:
Thank you, Stan. It was a pleasure. Always a pleasure.

Speaker A [00:55:48]:
I really appreciate John taking time from holding sway over all that water to talk with us about the Missouri river and the sediment avengers. I'm kicking myself a little bit because he rolled off a few classic remus stories after I stopped recording. That is just a rookie error on my part, but it's also kind of a reminder of why I'm doing this. It is hard to overestimate the river mechanics wisdom distributed across our federal agencies, wisdom that doesn't always make it into the journals because agencies respond to different incentives in the academy, and I appreciate these men and women taking time to share it with us in the next regular episode.

Speaker B [00:56:22]:
In two weeks, well talk to Chris.

Speaker A [00:56:24]:
Nygaard about modeling giant sediment pulses, both real and imagined. Chris built sediment models of Mount St. Helens, post eruption sediment management, and a hypothetical dam removal alternative to the Snake river. Hes also been on the ground on site at more Pacific Northwest restoration sites than anyone else I know, and he has thoughts. So well release that in a couple of weeks. But we may also start releasing periodic bonus episodes in the off weeks, starting with a brief conversation on the upcoming federal interagency Sediment conference that we call cedhide. In the next few weeks, we're planning to drop a short conversation with a couple of its organizers. This podcast was funded by the Regional Sediment Management program, which is the RSM. In the podcast title, people have asked. We also received funding from the Coors Flood and Coastal Storm damage Reduction R and D program and the HH and C SEpP program. These are informal conversations, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the position of the US Army Corps of Engineers, their partners, or the offices or centers of the guests or host.

Speaker B [00:57:22]:
And frankly, informal conversations do not always.

Speaker A [00:57:25]:
Even reflect the positions of the speakers themselves, as we are sometimes workshopping ideas in real time. Mike Loretto edited this episode and wrote the music for this season. And seriously, I could not do this without him. Great work as usual, Mike. Thanks for tuning in.