Wayne Dewey Criddle was born May 7, 1914 in Syracuse, Utah the son of William Delbert and Hazel Armstrong Criddle. Criddle received his BS in civil engineering from Utah State University and an MS in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He married Erma Ellen Sheffield on June 16, 1934.

Criddle worked as a professor of engineering at Utah State University for 20 years, served as the Utah State Engineer from 1957 to 1965, was the president of the Clyde-Criddle Woodward, Inc., cConsulting engineers of Salt Lake City, and worked as a consulting engineer for Harza Engineering Company International. During the course of his career, Criddle was responsible for establishing water requirements on irrigated lands in the lower Colorado River Basin, which were subsequently adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Arizona vs. California. Criddle was employed by the U.S.D.A. and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs to work on irrigation, water conservation, and related projects throughout the western United States and in many countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America. He served as chairman of the United States Committee of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) and as a vice president of the ICID during 1970 and 1973.

Criddle was the author and co-author of hundreds of publications, including Conservation Irrigation (1950), Methods for Evaluating Irrigation Systems (1956), Irrigation Training Guide (1957), Utah's Future Water Problems (1958). He was also the co-founder of the Blaney-Criddle Method, a scientific approach to gage computed water requirements. Criddle died November 29, 1996 in Salt Lake City.

Source: Obituary, Deseret News, 5 December 1996.