The old man nodded with satisfaction. "You two go get out of that field gear and then report back here in an hour. We've got a staff conference and I want you two in on it." He dismissed them with a wave of his hand and went back to the reports piled on his desk.
In the locker room, Troy and Alec peeled out of the snowsuits and changed into street clothes. "I wonder what's in the wind," Troy asked thoughtfully. "Must be something big enough to bug the old man into brain-picking, otherwise he'd never stoop to juniors before making a decision."
"Probably just wants to set up next summer's vacation schedule," Alec grunted as he bent over to slip on his shoes. "You can bet that if it were something important, he'd never be concerned with the opinions of the likes of us."
An hour later they walked back into the supervisor's office to find it jammed with the heads of all sections together with leading techs and junior engineers. "Go next door and grab yourselves a couple of chairs," Wilson barked, "and then get back in here."
When the full staff was assembled, Wilson stood up and faced the group.
"This won't take too long," he began, "but it's a problem that I want all of you to be considering during the next fifteen days because we have to come up with a reasonable solution to the problem—just another one that's been dumped in our laps."
He pressed a button on his desk and a mural, three-dimensional typographical map of the five-state Region Six flashed on the wall behind him. Across the top of the map was a line of illuminated numerical panels that shifted in values before their eyes, changing with the factor information constantly being fed into the computers. These were the constant monitoring reports from the regional computers on snow pack, moisture content, streamflow, water consumption and other that formulated the equations that the forecasters and ration controllers user in determining water supply allocations.
Hundreds of multi-colored lights on the map indicated industrial, municipal, domestic and agricultural water use facilities.
"We've been asked to assist in the critical situation in Region Five," Wilson continued. "Region Five included California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. As you've seen from the combined western forecasts, snow pack has been much below normal this year in Region Five and has for the past three years. We've been piping a lot of water down the line and so far, they've been able to meet demands. But a new factor has entered.