WATER 115 



These engineering projects of the federal government were 

 largely concentrated on what is called downstream engineering. 

 This is another way of saying that they were efforts to control 

 the effects rather than the causes of excessive run'off. But as 

 these effects became more severe people were forced to think 

 about the cause. It took droughts, floods and a dust storm over 

 Washington to make Congress really see that no matter what 

 they had been doing to handle the water problem, it was not 

 enough. 



In 1928 Congress had passed the first inclusive flood control 

 act. This law turned over to the War Department the task of 

 laying out a system of dams, levees, and spillways to protect the 

 people in the valleys of the main river systems. In spite of this 

 program, floods, particularly in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, 

 reached new extremes of disaster. Finally, in 1936 Congress 

 passed a flood control act which recognised that floods were not 

 simply a problem of engineering. This act defined flood control 

 as a problem of the entire watershed instead of simply main river 

 channels. 



The Flood Control Act of 1936 supplemented by the Flood 

 Control Act of 1938 divided the work of controlling run'off 

 between the War Department and the Department of Agricul' 

 ture. To the War Department went the task of planning and 

 building the great engineering works of downstream control. 

 The Department of Agriculture undertook the problem of man 

 agement of land to divert excessive run'off from the rivers to 

 underground channels. 



By this time soil erosion had become as popular a topic of 

 newspaper articles as the endless fertility of the Great American 

 West had been generations before. And along with this popular 

 interest in soil erosion came the United States Soil Conservation 

 Service, which was created in 1933. There are two ways to look 

 at erosion. First you can think of it as a loss of soil. That is how 



