William Elmo Warne, a specialist in land reclamation and irrigation who served the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and who directed a phase of California's immense California Water Project, died on March 9 at a convalescent home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 90.
Mr. Warne, a 1927 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, had been a resident of Sacramento and Palo Alto. He was born in Seafield, Ind.
Mr. Warne joined the Interior Department in 1935 as an editor in its Bureau of Reclamation. He became an assistant commissioner in the bureau in 1943 and was named an assistant secretary of the interior in 1947.
Among his responsibilities were water, drainage and power development. He helped design and develop the Columbia and Missouri River Basin projects and had a hand in Indian affairs and in preparing Hawaii and Alaska for statehood.
After President Harry Truman created the Point Four program of technical assistance, a forerunner of the Agency for International Development, he sent Mr. Warne to Iran in 1951. For the next four years, he directed the program to modernize the country's agriculture.
In the late 1950s he took up similar tasks for the State Department in Brazil and in South Korea.
The state of California enlisted him in 1959 as director of the Departments of Fish and Game, Agriculture and Water Resources.
In the 1960s, as the head for six years of California's water resources agency, he oversaw a major phase of the California Water Project that, once completed, produced a 444-mile network of aqueducts and coffer dams channeling water from Northern California to the Los Angeles area.
He returned to private life in 1967. He later ran a consulting firm and became a farmer, raising walnuts and almonds. He remained a farmer until his death.
He is survived by two daughters and a son.