COMOY

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

\

4.12.1803 Decize/F - 10.1.1885 Paris/F

\

Guillaume-Emmanuel Comoy was educated at Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, appointed engi- neer of the third class in 1829, and promoted to chief engineer in 1843. During this period, he was responsible for the navigation service of Canal du Centre. In 1857 Comoy was promoted to Inspector General of the Ponts et Chaussées Corps and in 1873 took the highest rank in the corps as vice-president of the general council for one year. From 1869, he was a Commander of Légion d'Honneur.

\

Comoy spent almost his entire career with the canal service in Châlon-sur-Saône on Loire River. After the large 1856 inundations, the Emperor Napoleon III asked Comoy to investigate the causes. Comoy presented his report in 1860 resulting in the following main statements: Whereas the dike heights along the river had been constantly increased in the past, floods increased in parallel causing larger damage to the valleys. Comoy demonstrated that the flood discharges are almost proportional to the dike height considered. He then proposed the idea for river management as a regional instead of a local problem, using methods accounting for the entire catchment area instead of a local patchwork. He also investigated the propagation characteristics of floods in rivers and may be considered a predecessor to Charles Kleitz (1808-1886), who had also been a vice-president of the corps. After retirement in 1874, Comoy published a note on the various methods for soil consolidation, and in 1881 another paper on the fluvial bores in the Corps' journal Annales des Ponts et Chaussées. There, he studied the mascaret, a moving hydraulic jump due to large increase of tailwater, as did previously Henry Bazin (1829-1917).

\

_{Anonymous (1916). Guillaume-Emmanuel Comoy. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 86: 87-88. Anonymous (1919). Comoy. Vice-présidents du Conseil Général des Ponts et Chaussées: 6. Ponts et Chaussées Equipements, La Défense: Paris. P}

_{Comoy, G.-E. (1837). Note sur quelques mesures d'ordre propres à faciliter l'entretien des canaux. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 7(1): 67-77.}

_{Comoy, G.-E. (1851). Mémoire sur la marche des bateaux en convoi dans les canaux de navigation. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 21(2): 261-301.}

_{Comoy, G.-E. (1868). Mémoires sur les ouvrages de défense contre les inondations. Dunod: Paris.}

_{Comoy, G.-E. (1875). Notice sur divers travaux de consolidation de terrains éboulés. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 45(2): 8-51.}

_{Comoy, G.-E. (1881). Etude pratique sur les marées fluviales et notamment sur le mascaret: Application aux travaux de la partie maritime des fleuves. Gauthier-Villars: Paris.}