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Speech delivered on
the occasion of the Institute's
21st anniversary in 1993 by
Joan S.
Whitmore [1922-2002]
(Joan Whitmore was the first director,
1970-1977)
Related
documents:
Against the tranquil backdrop of
Roodeplaat Dam and the surrounding
hills, the Hydrological Research
Institute was the scene of unusual
animation, activity and anticipation on
20th October 1972 in
preparation for the official opening
ceremony that afternoon. In front of
the building the Public Works
Department had erected a sturdy
platform decked with the Department of
Water Affair's logo and set out lorry
loads of chairs. It also brought masses
of colourful pot-plants with which to
decorate the foyer, the corridors and
main offices. 
The commemorative plaque was mounted at
the entrance, and I duly checked that
when the Minister pulled the cord to
unveil it, the velvet curtain would
slide back smoothly. Meanwhile the
staff mounted exhibits and posters, and
prepared the refreshments. We'd thought
of every contingency except one, the
unusual heat - but in answer to an
urgent appeal at the Minister's behest,
a Coca Cola van raced up an hour before
the proceedings commenced, with a load
of red and white sun umbrellas. Then a
stream of cars arrived, bringing
representatives of many Departments and
organizations with an interest in
water. The guests sought shelter under
the sun umbrellas and the Ministerial
party mounted the platform, the ladies
wearing hats and gloves as befitted
those times and the formality of the
occasion. The Rev. WB Jansen opened the
proceedings with scripture reading and
prayer, whereupon I, as the Director of
the Institute welcomed the guests. The
Secretary for Water Affairs, Mr JP
Kriel, introduced the Minister, the
Hon. SP (Fanie) Botha who, after
delivering an address, unveiled the
plaque, whereupon the Chief of
Scientific Services, Dr PW de Lange,
thanked one and all. The staff then
conducted the guests on a tour of the
Institute and served them
refreshments.
And now I should like to tell you
how all this began, and why.
As you all well know, it is because
South Africa's water supplies are at
best undependable, and at worst grossly
inadequate, that they are infinitely
more precious than our much vaunted
gold -- for they are vital not only to
all sectors of our economy but to our
very survival and that of every plant
and creature. Small wonder therefor
that South Africa has a long and
creditable history of water research
and development. I recall hearing vivid accounts
by the late Dr M S du Toit, an eminent soil scientist
who later became Secretary for Agriculture,
of his arduous trips by donkey cart and
mule wagon to lay out the Olifants
River and other early irrigation
schemes in the western Cape Province.
In another sphere the late Prof. CL
Wicht put forest hydrology on the world
map with his catchment experiments at
Jonkershoek on the effects of
afforestation and forest management on
stream flow, in which he was a pioneer
in the statistical design and
evaluation of controlled catchment
Experiments. We can also look back with
admiration on the construction, largely
by manual labour, of the Vaal-Hartz
Irrigation Scheme, a major scheme by
any standards, which was undertaken
primarily to give employment to many of
those hit by the great depression of
the early '30's. That the entire scheme
was completed without provision of
drainage canals for the return flow was
certainly an oversight but one which
could be remedied later and which did
not detract from the magnitude of the
achievement at a time of acute economic
recession. And later came bold and
imaginative schemes in yet another
sphere, that of large-scale transfer of surplus water
from some catchments to make good deficiencies in
others, the Tugela-Vaal and Orange-Fish
being two major examples. And when the
need arose to start thinking of
desalinating and reusing water, Dr
Stander of the CSIR earned world
recognition.
It seems to me that during the first
60 years of this century we relied more
on the vision, initiative and drive of
gifted individuals, than on the
corporate style of management via a
plethora of committees, which is so
prevalent today
The years following World War II saw
an explosive proliferation of research
on the occurrence and use of water in
many State Departments and
Universities. Thus the Weather Bureau
not only expanded its rain gauge
network but also moved towards greater
automation. The Department of
Agriculture intensified its research on
not only the chemical but also the
physical (especially moisture)
characteristics of soil types, also on
crop water requirements and water use
efficiency in relation to planting date
and density, fertilizer treatment and
other variables, and on irrigation
scheduling. The Departments of
Agriculture and of Forestry as well as
various universities increased the
number of controlled catchment
experiments (often maintaining
independent flow-gauging and weather
stations). The Department of Water
Affairs likewise expanded its network
of hydrometric stations, gradually
substituting automatic recorders for
visual observations: it also maintained
a network of rainfall and evaporation
stations independently of the Weather
Bureau, and like the Geological Survey
also operated a network of groundwater
stations.
The foregoing indicates that
although there was much activity across
a broad spectrum of hydrological
research, it was fragmented. Not only
was there considerable overlap and
duplication of effort (and expenditure)
but some fields of research suffered
neglect, and there was undue
competition for scarce staff and
funding.
An interdepartmental commission
appointed to address these problems
recognized the need for specialised
research to continue in various
departments but recommended:
(a) the appointment of an
Interdepartmental Coordinating
Committee for Hydrological Research
(b) the creation of a focal point in
the form of a central Division of
Hydrological Research within an
existing department, to give a lead and
impetus to hydrological research as a
whole, to initiate new research,
amplify work already in progress and
eliminate gaps in the field.
The merits of attaching that new
division to the Department of Water
Affairs (then the Department of
Irrigation) are debatable, firstly
because the department had not itself
felt the need for such a division which
was virtually foisted upon it, and
secondly because the department was not
research-oriented, its main function
having been to construct and administer
dams, and thirdly because it had only
engineers, not scientists on its
professional staff. Be that as it may,
the new division of Hydrological
Research was established in 1958, with
a departmental engineer, Mr TC Menne as
its Director, and another engineer, Mr
JP Kriel, as one of the two Assistant
Directors, the other members of the
nucleus of staff being drawn from other
departments such as the Department of
Mines (Dr J Enslin), Transport (Mr K
Harvey) and Agriculture (myself).
For all that the Interdepartmental
Commission had recommended the creation
of a Division of Hydrological RESEARCH,
the Commission had failed to make any
mention of research facilities. All we
had to work with were the valuable
accumulated hydrometric records of
stream flow, dams and boreholes. A lot
could be extracted from them, my first
breakthrough coming when I could prove
by covariance and other statistical
techniques that the reduced inflow into
certain dams and the increasingly
frequent need to cut water quotas was
not due solely to drought as had been
assumed but to the effects on runoff of
changed land management upstream in the
catchments. Initially, though not for
long, scientists and engineers were
paid the same salary, and so were men
and women on the professional staff.
This gave us an edge in recruitment
over other departments, enabling us to
recruit staff in droves only to lose
them again in droves a few months later
for lack of research facilities. After
losing much sleep over this problem the
light dawned at 3:00 one morning: Of
course we needed to build a research
institute, big enough to accommodate
the many facets of hydrological
research needing attention, and the
best of its kind in the world!! A
simple and obvious solution - but how
to set about it?
As a newcomer, relatively junior, a
non-engineer, and the only woman on the
professional staff, the odds were
weighted heavily against me.
Instinctively I knew that if I followed
the prescribed "bottom-up" approach I
probably wouldn't get more than two
rungs up the hierarchical ladder of
consent before the scheme would be
firmly, finally and irrevocably
quashed. So with a blend of zealous and
unquenchable fervour and naivety I
decided that my only workable option
was to start at the top and try to
secure the approval of the head of the
department, Mr JM Jordaan, for my idea.
Knowing that he came to office at 7:00
in the morning I was already waiting in
the anteroom when he arrived. I put my
case, and five minutes later floated
out on a cloud of jubilation, having
obtained his enthusiastic approval in
principle. "I can already see the name
over the gate" he said. And that's when
my troubles began in earnest, for
naturally I had antagonised many people
in the Department by going over their
heads. But I was not unduly
conscience-stricken, having acted not
out of self-interest but from the utter
conviction that the Department and the
country truly and urgently, Needed a
research institute -- but paid the
penalty in the form of six lonely years
of fighting for that conviction. I
wrote countless submission and
memoranda based on solid facts and
arguments -- but not neglecting to add
on occasion that the head of the
Department supported the idea. Within
the Department I had to convince the
Staff Committee, the Planning
Committee, the Finance Committee and
several others, not to mention the
Interdepartmental Co-ordinating
Committee for Hydrological Research,
the Public Service Commission, the
Treasury, the Public Works Department,
and so on. Such was the opposition I
sometimes encountered that often in the
dark hours of the night I wondered "Is
it possible that everyone else is wrong
and only you are right?" But I had a
few supporters notably Mr Menne, the
head of the Division, who selected the
rock outcrop on which the Institute is
sited, the Chief Accountant, Mr Bekker,
who caught my vision, and the Circle
Engineer, Mr JC Cox who helped in
countless ways with the water supply,
the fencing and other practical matters
once the Institute had been erected
within his domain.
But my troubles were far from being
at an end. Without having visited the
site, the architect produced a plan of
a concrete box of a building which
would have blended well with countless
other similar boxes in a modern
concrete city, but would have
desecrated the beautiful virgin terrain
where the Institute was to be erected.
Our views were so divergent that
finally we drove through Pretoria
looking for any building styles or
features that were acceptable to both
of us -- and fortunately we found
common ground in the architecture of
Norman Eaton. Thus the columnar
brickwork of the facade is a feature
culled from the wall he designed around
a church. Some irreversible mistakes
occurred. 
Thus I had not realised from the plans
that the windows in some laboratories
were inconveniently high. Also I had
wanted the stone foundation to be rough
and craggy so as to harmonise with the
surrounding rocks and was dismayed to
find one morning that the Italian
stonemasons had set the stones in a
smooth jigsaw pattern before I could
intervene. To crown it all, the builder
went bankrupt before he had completed
the building. The daunting thought
occurred to me that if Winston
Churchill could take up bricklaying,
maybe so should I in order to finish
the building project - but the Public
Works Department re-awarded the
contract, and finally after all these
frustrating setbacks and delays, the
building was ready for occupation in
1970.
In designing the Institute I wanted
to profit from the experience of others
- but as most hydrological research
units have been part of existing
engineering department, I wrote to a
wide range of other research
organizations worldwide, asking the
basic question: "Based on your
experience since the inception of your
institute, what mistakes would you be
careful to avoid if you had to start
again?" Two items of advice stood out:
Firstly - build a structure far larger
than is required for present
requirements and those envisaged for
the near future. In this I was thwarted
by the Public Works Department's design
regulations of x square metres
per person, plus y%, which
allowed for only modest, that is,
short-term growth. The best way I saw
of overcoming this restriction was to
make it possible to build extensions at
the ends of each wing and transverse
corridor -- a facility which has since
proved its worth. Secondly -- build for
flexibility, for in a new, broad,
innovative and rapidly developing field
of research such as hydrology you have
no inkling of what you will be engaged
upon ten years hence. If you fail to
build an adaptable structure it may
well be outmoded and redundant not long
after completion. This provision for
changing and expanding needs I tried to
achieve by extensive use of demountable
interior walls, enabling the number,
size, shape and use of rooms to be
altered at will at only modest expense
and inconvenience. But the price of
this versatility was some loss of
privacy, for the partitions were far
from soundproof.
I have dwelt on the events which led
to the founding of the Hydrological
Research Institute (herein after
referred to as the HRI), and on its
design philosophy -- but what of the
work for which the HRI was intended? It
was clearly the view of the "founding
fathers" -- the Interdepartmental
Commission which, to counter the
growing fragmentation of hydrological
research, recommended the establishment
of a central, unifying division of
hydrological research -- that hydrology
was, and should be nurtured as, a
HOLISTIC science. This is a view I
still uphold. At the risk of being
trite, let me repeat what is well-known
but tends to be overlooked -- that our
planet's water resources, dating back
to its creation, are substantially
fixed but are both highly mobile and
subject to constant changes in form
between the gaseous (water vapour),
liquid (water) and solid (ice) forms.
Interacting powerfully with other
substances, our water resources are
also highly variable and sensitive as
regards quality. In effect, the many
hydrological processes are intricately
interrelated, with the result
that a change in any one has a
chain-reaction on others, often with
far-reaching consequences. Thus even
common practices such as burning large
expanses of veld or ploughing them and
planting mielies alter the quantity,
time disposition and quality of runoff,
base flow, and groundwater accrual, not
to mention the quantity and quality of
water reaching users downstream. More
often than not these changes, sometimes
damaging, occur inadvertently and may
be difficult to remedy - but they could
have been anticipated by the
foreknowledge whose acquisition is the
task of the hydrological researcher.
But such foreknowledge also enables us
to manipulate hydrological
processes beneficially, one example
being mulching to curb unproductive
evaporation of soil moisture, so as to
make more available for assimilation
and thus the growth and yield of crops.
Cloud seeding, again, is an example of
an intervention with potential for both
harm and good.
Consequently the HRI initially
comprised seven sections viz.:
-
Hydrometeorology:
The atmosphere being regarded as the
primary renewable source of fresh
water, the section studied, inter
alia, changes in the intensity /
frequency distribution of rainfall,
runs of wet and dry years, the
incidence and classification of
drought, prediction of the mean
annual rainfall of ungauged
catchments based on altitude and
locality factors, the feasibility of
extracting water from cloud caps on
mountains, and evaporation
suppression, and also collaborated
with the Weather Bureau in a study of
the hydrological consequences of
rainfall stimulation.
- Surface water
hydrology: This section
initiated some of the earliest
attempts in South Africa in computer
modelling of river flow, and
undertook studies of seiches and the
propagation of density currents in
dams, of the transport and deposition
of sediments, and of estimating and
reducing evaporation from dams.
- Groundwater
hydrology: In addition to
studies on the natural and artificial
recharge of aquifers, the use of
radioactive and stable isotopes and
other techniques for studying
groundwater recharge, movement, yield
and age, and even the use of
explosives to increase borehole
yields, many ad hoc investigations
were conducted in various parts of
the country.
- Water Quality:
Anticipating the growing threat of
water pollution despite enlightened
water legislation aimed at prevention
rather than cure, the HRI initiated
an extensive preliminary limnological
survey of all major fresh water
bodies in South Africa, and was also
one of the first to acquire an
Auto-analyser to automate and so
speed up the analysis of the rapidly
increasing number of water samples.
It transpired that the instrument had
been designed primarily for use in
the medical sphere, so many
adjustments and recalibrations had to
be made. Biological studies of water
and sediments also commenced.
- Catchment
Management: The work of this
section centred mainly on statistical
analysis of meteorological and
hydrometric records to discern trends
in unit runoff and flow
characteristics, and by linking these
to successive aerial and ground
surveys to interpret the trends in
terms of discernible changes in land
use.
- Hydrological
Techniques: This section
concentrated on testing and
developing new research techniques
such as the use of isotopes,
simulation modelling, evaporation
measurement and estimation, water
sampling etc., which could then be
used by other sections in their
specific investigations.
- Multi-disciplinary
Research: The main function
of this section was to liaise with
bodies such as the Geological Survey,
the Weather Bureau, the Department of
Agriculture and of Forestry, the
CSIR, and various universities on
joint research and other matters of
common concern. It also functioned as
the secretariat of the
Interdepartmental Committee for
Hydrological Research.
It is questionable whether any
organisation ever achieves its full
potential. That is certainly true of
the HRI, for it encountered many
problems.
For one thing, at its inception
there was no formal, comprehensive
training for hydrologists available in
South Africa except for the courses
included in the curricula of some
engineering faculties. Instead we had
to recruit staff from a range of
scientific disciplines such as
mathematics, geology, geography,
physics, chemistry, botany and zoology,
some of which had only tenuous links
with water. Moreover, as it was a
period when there were more attractive
openings in the private sector, we had
to employ whom we could get rather than
what we needed to implement our
research blueprint. (For example, at
one stage there was a surfeit of
nuclear physicists). Inevitably this
led to some imbalances and gaps in the
staff structure and research progress.
But on the positive side there was a
lot of cross-fertilization of ideas and
expertise, and at one stage there were
no fewer than eight nationalities among
the staff. Moreover, on occasion
graduate students from the University
of Aberystwyth and from Germany spent
some months at the HRI, assisting in
projects and gaining experience.
The second but perhaps the major
drawback was that, by nature and by
training, relatively few scientists,
then or now, are able to think
holistically -- and as I have
emphasised, hydrology with its
multiplicity of finely balanced
interactions is a holistic science.
Perhaps the problem arose from our
education system which requires
students to start specialising early
on, causing a student's sphere of
knowledge to become ever narrower and
more concentrated, whereas a
hydrologist needs to comprehend an ever
broader spectrum. It is a
transformation of thought process that
many are unable, or disinclined, to
achieve. Speaking personally I count it
a singular privilege and advantage to
have taken a hybrid degree with an
almost equal balance of arts and
science subjects, for I think that the
sciences lend precision to the arts
which, in turn, impart vision to the
sciences. Perhaps the science and
philosophy of ecology has progressed
further than hydrology in promoting the
holistic approach -- and there are some
tentative signs that this may also be
starting to develop in medicine.
Thirdly we had to contend with
piracy. The HRI proved to be a good
recruiting outfit, and once they had
proved their merit, the most promising
staff were sometimes transferred to
other divisions within the Department,
who had been less successful in the
recruitment race. This dubious practice
climaxed when, after a gruelling Public
Service inspection, two posts of
Assistant Director were created for the
HRI -- whereupon head office promptly
filched them both to promote and retain
engineers elsewhere in the country,
leaving me, as Director to continue
carrying the acknowledged workload of
three people.
And fourthly the swing of the
pendulum between centralisation and
decentralisation, between aggregation
and segregation, which for so long has
been characteristic of the Public
Service, continued, and has probably
not yet ceased. A growing organization
almost inevitably tends to be split up
-- as for example, when geohydrological
research hived off as a separate
entity.
And fifthly, research emphasis
inevitably shifts with changing needs.
This is right and natural -- provided
it does not become too narrow and
inflexible, or deprive other research
fields of the attention they merit.
That the HRI has survived for 21
years suggests that it has indeed met a
need, and is a tribute to the
dedication of its staff. It has come a
long way since it was officially opened
on 20 October 1972, its achievements
based on satellite imagery being but
one of the exciting new developments
never envisaged at that time. I wish to
congratulate you one and all, and to
wish you continued success in
confronting the mounting challenges of
the future.
JOAN S. WHITMORE 21 October 1993.
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