THOMAS

UNITED KINGDOM (see also List of Individuals)

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9.12.1905/UK - 8.1.1986 Bury Pulborough/UK

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Anthony Ryland Thomas graduated from the Technical College, University College, Cardiff. He then joined the Indian Service of Engineers with appointments as executive engineer in the Irrigation Department from 1929 to 1947. He was the Deputy Director of the Central Irrigation and Hydrodynamic Research Station in Poona from 1949 to 1951; in parallel he served as Secretary of the Central Board of Irrigation, India. From 1952 to 1954, Thomas was a consulting engineer in Iraq. In 1957 he became a United Nations Member in charge of missions to East Pakistan. From 1958 to 1972, finally, he joined Binnie and Partners, London, as a consultant in hydraulics. Thomas was awarded the Order of the British Empire OBE in 1947; he received the Overseas Premium from the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1955 and its Telford Silver Medal in 1967. In 1975, Thomas was awarded the J.C. Stevens Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE.

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Thomas received the J.C. Stevens Award for his discussion on Sedimentation in the Mangla Reservoir. He was involved in the design and the execution of the Mangla Dam Scheme, one of the largest worldwide in the 1960s. Mangla is an earthfill dam of 110 m height and a dam crest length of 3,000 m fed by an enormous catchment area of almost 30,000 km2. The capacity of the spillways is 28,000 m3/s. The scheme was completed in 1967 with a hydropower generation of 1,000 MW. Some 40,000 persons were displaced by the dam raising. The scheme was erected after independence of India and Pakistan from the UK in 1947. In an effort to mitigate the consequences of possible interference by India with the supplies of the canals, Pakistan embarked on a program to enable the transfer of water between rivers. Until 1967, Pakistan was dependent on unregulated flows of the Indus River. Because of seasonal variations, the agricultural yield was low. Mangla Dam was the first project undertaken to strengthen the irrigation system.

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_{Anonymous (1975). Stevens Award to A.R. Thomas. Civil Engineering 45(10): 103. P Anonymous (1985). Thomas, Anthony R. Who's who in engineering: 657. EJC: New York. Binnie, G.M., Thomas, A.R. (1967). Engineering of Mangla. Proc. Institution of Civil Engineers 38: 338-544.}

_{Binnie, G.M., Thomas, A.R., Gwyther, J.R. (1973). Inflatable weir used during the construction of Mangla Dam. Proc. Institution Civil Engineers 54: 625-639; 56: 189-194.}

_{Thomas, A.R. (1957). Some experiments on the control of the hydraulic jump. 3 ICID Congress}

_{San Francisco Q9: 77-90.}