The technical content of this chapter is important to the professional hydrologist, but practice is not confined to making technical decisions. The intent of this discussion question is to show that hydrologists must often address situations where value issues intermingle with the technical aspects of a project. In discussing the stated problem, at a minimum include responses to the following questions:
1. What value issues are involved, and how are they in conflict?
2. Are technical issues related to the value issues? If so, in what way are the technical issues in conflict with the value issues?
3. If the hydrologist attempted to rationalize the situation, what rationalizations might he or she use? Provide arguments to suggest why the excuses represent rationalization.
4. What are the hydrologist’s alternative courses of action? Identify all alternatives, regardless of the ethical implications.
5. How should the conflict be resolved?
You may want to review Sections 1.6 to 1.12 in Chapter 1 in responding to the problem statement.
Case. An engineer is designing a debris-flow protection facility for use at the outlet of a steep canyon. The method that is used to predict the volume of debris (mud flow) that can be expected at the outlet of the canyon requires values of some labor-intensive watershed characteristics (a hypsometric index and the length to the center of area). To keep project costs at a minimum, the engineer uses average values from past projects on which she has worked rather than making the computations for the complex watershed.
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