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JACOB HENRICK DOUMA
1912–2004
Elected in 1971
“For contributions, as a hydraulic engineer and consultant,
to federal and private practice here and abroad.”
BY MARTIN REUSS
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY
A FTER 34 YEARS of distinguished government service,
mostly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacob (Jake) H.
Douma emerged as one of the preeminent hydraulic engineers
in the world. He was chief of the Hydraulic Design Branch in
the Corps of Engineers from 1961 to 1975 and then became chief
of the combined Hydraulic and Hydrology Branch, a position
he held until his retirement in 1979.
Douma made many contributions that improved and made
more cost-efficient the federal water projects that now dot—and
helped shape—the American landscape. He was influential in
designing flood-control channels, dams, locks, navigation
channels, and other water-control structures. He also encouraged
the use of computer modeling and helped write numerous
technical manuals that have become standard references. For
many years after he retired from government service, he was a
consultant on projects around the world. He died on October
4, 2004, at the age of 92.
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52 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Jake was born in Hanford, California, south of Fresno, on
May 30, 1912, the son of Dutch immigrants. Jake grew up in
California’s “Inland Empire,” where he irrigated alfalfa fields
during his summer vacations. This backbreaking work involved
periodically digging ditches to ensure that water ran to the right
portion of the field. Determined to find a better way, Jake read
about the Bureau of Reclamation’s contributions to irrigation
and decided to pursue engineering in college.
At the University of California, Berkeley, he excelled in his
studies, was tapped for Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor
Society, and became president of the Berkeley chapter in the
fall of his senior year. His principal mentors at Berkeley were
Morrough O’Brien and Bernard Etchevary, his favorite
professor, whose practical, project-oriented approach he found
particularly appealing. In 1935, after five years of study, he
graduated, cum laude, with a B.S. in civil engineering and a focus
on hydraulics and irrigation.
Jake applied for a job working on dams and irrigation projects
for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Army Corps
of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station (WES), a newly
established hydraulic laboratory at Vicksburg, Mississippi. WES
offered five dollars more a month than TVA, so he ended up in
Vicksburg, where he learned that recent changes in pay scales
would raise his monthly paycheck another 15 dollars—to $120.
His first job was reading water gauges on a three-dimensional
model of the lower 600 miles of the Mississippi River. He later
became a research assistant working on model studies of
Conchas Dam, a flood-control dam on the Canadian River in
New Mexico.
He later accepted a job at the Bureau of Reclamation working
on irrigation and hydropower studies in the Project Investigations
Branch in Denver. However, he was soon bored with the work,
which involved routine tabulation of rainfall and runoff records.
He was more interested in the bureau’s model studies of dams,
canals, and various irrigation systems, and he eventually
obtained work in the bureau’s laboratory in Denver, where he
helped develop model studies for Lahontan Dam in Nevada
and the Boulder (Hoover) Dam tunnel spillway. While in
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JACOB HENRICK DOUMA
Denver, he also completed graduate courses in hydraulics and
soil mechanics at Colorado State University.
Anxious to return to California and promised more pay, Jake
took a job in the Los Angeles District of the Corps of Engineers
in 1939. Almost immediately, he was loaned out to the Nashville
District to assist in the design of Wolf Creek Dam in Tennessee,
which was similar to Conchas Dam. After three months, he
returned to Los Angeles, where he worked in the hydraulic
design section. After about a year he became section chief and
oversaw the design of numerous debris and flood-control dams
and channels, including the San Gabriel River channel and
Prado Dam.
One of his most important innovations was the application
of high-speed highway design to high-velocity flood-control
channels to create spiral transitions between straight sections
and curves like the ones in professional race tracks or toboggan
runs. The design was first used in a water project in the Tujunga
Wash Flood Channel.
In December 1946, Jake moved to the Office of the Chief of
Engineers in Washington, D.C., where he spent the rest of his
government career. His main task was to review hydraulic-
design reports prepared in Corps subordinate offices. He also
worked in the Structural Branch of the Civil Works Directorate,
where he raised the Corps’ awareness of the consequences of
poorly designed concrete structures susceptible to cavitation
erosion resulting from high-velocity flows. He participated in
the model testing of many major dams, including Oahe, Fort
Randall, and Garrison on the Missouri River; McNary on the
Columbia River; and several locks and dams on the Ohio River.
He also led efforts to develop design-criteria charts and
manuals, many of which were soon in widespread use beyond
the Corps of Engineers.
In 1961, Jake became chief of the Hydraulic Design Branch
in the Engineering Division of the Corps of Engineers
Headquarters. In 1975, he became chief of the new combined
Hydraulics Design and Hydrology Branch. He was also
representative of the Chief of Engineers on the Committee on
Tidal Hydraulics, which he helped establish in 1947, and the
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54 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Committee on Channel Stabilization, which he proposed in
1965 and chaired until his retirement in 1979. He was also
instrumental in developing a proposal for the Dredged Material
Research Program (DMRP), which Congress authorized in 1970,
to answer numerous questions about the impact of dredging
on the environment.
Jake’s expertise was recognized in his appointment as
consultant on a large number of national and international water
projects, including Guayaquil Harbor (Ecuador), Mactaquac
Dam (Canada), Gull Island Dam (Canada), Tarbela Dam
(Pakistan), and Reza Shah Kabir Dam (Iran). After retirement,
he was consultant on Pardee Dam (California), Rafferty Dam
(Canada), Susitna Dam (Alaska), and Horse Mesa Dam
(Arizona). He was the author of 27 papers on multipurpose
dams and flood-control channels and a contributor to Handbook
of Applied Hydraulics, edited by V. Calvin Davis and K. Sorenson
(1969) and a National Research Council report, Safety of Existing
Dams: Evaluation and Improvement (1983).
Jake served on the U.S. Committees of the International
Commission on Large Dams and the International Commission
on Irrigation, Drainage, and Flood Control, as well as the
Committee on Gates and Valves for Dams of the International
Association for Hydraulic Research. He was a life member of
the American Society of Civil Engineering and was elected a
member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1971. In
1982 the Corps of Engineers named him to its Gallery of
Distinguished Civilian Employees.
Jake’s wife of 63 years, Allene Vartia Douma, died in 2002.
He is survived by his sons, Allen Douma of Ashland, Oregon,
and Mark Douma, and grandson, Jacob Mark Douma, both of
Great Falls, Virginia.
His son remembers that his father really was born in a
tarpaper shack by the side of the road. On a trip back to Hanford
in 1998, he could point out the spot, but of course it wasn’t there.
At Berkeley, he earned money by being a waiter in a college
girls boarding school. His parents spoke Dutch at home, so he
had to take “bonehead” English to improve his proficiency. He
got a “C” in railroad engineering, but otherwise did well. His
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JACOB HENRICK DOUMA
future wife was a spectator at a Bureau of Reclamation
intramural basketball game in Denver. After moving to
Washington, they bought land in Virginia to build a house, but
only after checking the soil fertility. The land included a stream
which provided irrigation water. The house was their own
design, and he was the architect while she was the prime
contractor. While his family lived in the basement of the
unfinished house, he went to India for a conference on large
dams, the first of many worldwide. He calculated that he
covered 1.5 million miles in his travels. He never learned how
to type, but eventually learned to write well.
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