CASPAR BOOY

Condolences & Memories (4 entries)

• As a former engineering student, I really appreciated Dr. Booy's vast knowledge of water resources and flood events. The course I took with him was one of the best in my civil engineering program and one that particularly stands out in my memory. My condolences to his family and may you know that he was an incredible teacher and passed along his passion for hydrology and flood control to his students. - Posted by: Angela Meier (Former Student) on: Jan 09, 2021

• Covid has prevented many a family from being together as a loved one dies and prevented funerals from happening to pay one's respects. From the funerals I have attended I always come away learning more about the person through the stories told, and this was no different when I attended Cas's wife's funeral in Nov 2018. The stories I remember how they met and the engraved promise ring before World War II started, getting married after the war and coming to Canada with a small family, how large their family was (I have never seen such a large family at a funeral), how they where very religious, how Cas played a musical instrument, how leading-edge health conscious and physically active they were well into their 90s. At University, Cas taught us a 3rd year hydrology course. It was a tough course many different topics and had a high failure rate. To improve the pass rate Cas implemented a test at the end of each topic, this required us to learn the material as it was being taught which is always a better study technique than cramming at exam time. Cas pass rate went up and the other profs weren't to pleased as we spent more time mastering his course and letting their courses slide. To undergrads Cas was a no-nonsense prof which he had to do when teaching 100 students per class, but when it came to grad studies he was totally different person and very personable. For his class, Cas produced a set of notes with a blue cover, these notes are a classic and sit on the bookshelves of many a water resource engineer that took his course. In water resources one builds on the work of others and advance the science, knowledge and projects. Cas was a student of floods particularly Red River floods, he followed the work of R.H. Clark (1950) and the RRBI(1953) that determined that there were two very large floods in the 1800s that well exceeded Winnipeg's devastating 1950 flood. These floods became the basis for the Floodway design. In his 60's Cass and his grad students proposed Bayesian statistics for analyzing Red River floods as an improvement over the standard statistical analysis. In his 80's Cass sat on a Technical Advisory Committee where Bruce Harding and myself redid the Floodway Rating Curve using 1966 flood dataset and used our calibrated model to re-estimate higher 1950 flows which were shown to be in error. In our last TAC meeting I recall Cas accepting our work and that he was anxious to get going as him and his wife were heading south on a camping trip in late April - which amazed me at their age. My condolences to Cass's extended family on your loss. - Posted by: Grant Mohr (student & City's flood engineer) on: Jan 05, 2021

• My condolences on the loss of your Father and Grandfather. Professor Booy was my mentor in the early 70's while I was doing my Master in Water Resource Management at the U. of M. His hydrologic expertise was unsurpassed in Canada at that time. His work in hydrology and extreme flood events was instrumental in the construction of the Gardiner Dam in Saskatchewan (one of the largest Dams in the world), while working for the PFRA, as well as the construction of the Red River Floodway and Lake Manitoba regulation, huge projects that depended on his analytical and statistical expertise to ensure the long term operational safety of these projects and many others, at a time when very little hydrologic and meteorological data was available in Western Canada. As a professor, not only was he effective in imparting knowledge to his students, he also truly cared and supported their achievements and he was a gentleman, whose office door at the University was always open and welcomed his students seeking his guidance with a smile and a lot of patience and understanding. The publication of his many manuscripts will ensure that his name and methodologies will continue to be quoted by future scholars and water resources managers for years to come. - Posted by: Erminio Caligiuri (Engineering Student) on: Dec 28, 2020

• Professor Booy had a profound positive impact on me as a person and as an engineer. In high school I was incapable of comprehending how one of my classmates could go on a christmas holiday to Hawaii. I thought that it was impossible to do something like that financially., None of my friends on my street in the North End went anywhere. As a result of Professor Booy I ended up choosing a career path that allowed me to work and study all over the world seemingly effortlessly and developed friendships with engineers from more than 30 different countries. I met up with professor Booy once in the Netherlands and again once in Indonesia and at the time this seemed like a totally normal thing to do. I am forever greatful to Professor Booy for putting me on a career path that enabled me to find things completely normal that as a high school student I was incapable of even imagining. - Posted by: mike buchko (undergrad and grad student) on: Dec 27, 2020