Bob Einhellig knows water - intimately and precisely.
As a hydraulic engineer with the Department of Reclamation facility in the Denver Federal Center, he is part of a team that works to manage, develop, and protect water and related resources.
The agency's job is huge. As the largest wholesale water provider, the department manages 348 reservoirs nationally with a total storage capacity of 245 million acre-feet of water (one acre-foot is enough to supply a family of four water for a year), among its many programs.
Einhellig shoulders a myriad of duties, including modeling projects in the Hydraulics Lab, teaching, working with organizational partners and field work.
"One of the great things about my job is I don't do the same thing every day," he said.
"One day I'm teaching classes, another day I'm doing a model out in the lab and working on that, another I might be out in an irrigation district in Utah or New Mexico, working in the field - one of the things I truly enjoy about my job is the diversity of things that we do."
Einhellig describes himself as "A Midwestern kid," growing up in Kansas and North Dakota and educated at the University of Kansas and University of Iowa, where he got the modeling bug at the Institute of Hydraulic Research.
The Hydraulics Lab is one of three at the facility- it also includes the Material Lab and Fisheries Lab - all interconnected through the staff and projects being worked on.
Bob and his colleagues have been to all 17 western states, the group comprises about 18 individuals including hydraulic engineers, support staff and those who actually build the models, who Bob gives a lot of credit to says the craftsmen "can build just about anything you can imagine, and without them we could hardly do our job."
The bureau staff is also actively involved in teaching, and a variety of duties beyond the hydraulic modeling, including training and education for the Reclamation staff, various water and irrigation district personnel, those in charge of water delivery systems and others. A class was meeting to learn water measurement techniques when YourHub.com toured Jan. 14.
Einhellig says the classes are driven by the need and desire for the bureau's cooperating entities to conserve water and manage it.
We have no regulatory authority as an agency; we don't tell people what they have to do or can or can't do, but they're coming to us because we're mandated to help conserve water resources and better manage water resources in the western united states, so we offer these classes with that end in mind," he said.
There's a lot of postive feedback to this job," he notes.
"The people you work with by and large very much appreciate any help you can give them. When you get out and work with irrigation districts, you work with power producers we're working the hydropower generation - all the different types of people that we encounter generally are very appreciative of the expertise that we're able to offer them and their unique problems, and there's just a lot of rewards, personal rewards and the relationships you form in that process. I guess I'm not the traditional engineer in that I like the people side of things."
Bob has lived in Colorado about 15 years and has a son who plays hockey and a daughter in high school who, he says, "consume 90 percent of my free time." They enjoy mountain sports like skiing and snowboarding as well as hiking and camping.
A current project is modeling physical changes planned for the Folsom Dam near Sacramento, Calif., where approved changes to protect against the potential of flooding and damage to the structure. They're being tested with a large scale-model of the dam built in the lab.
The Folsom dam, according to
Pete Soeth, Bureau of Reclamation public affairs specialist, lies just upstream of Sacramento on the American River and is the main flood control reservoir for the Sacramento valley.
The huge working true scale-model dam is arguably the lab's largest ever in floor size and the largest in terms of the water flow rate.
The model helps provide accurate data for how the changes will affect the dam's performance before millions of dollars are spent on the changes. The data collected provides invaluable information and can sometimes bring about design changes before they're implemented.
To learn more about the multi-faceted work of the Department of Reclamation, visit
http://www.usbr.gov