Semi-Lagrangian methods are now perhaps the most widely researched algorithms in connection with atmospheric flow simulation codes. In order to investigate their applicability to hydraulic problems, cubic Hermite polynomials are used as the interpolant technique. The main advantage of such an approach is the use of information from only two points. The derivatives are calculated and limited so as to produce a shape-preserving solution. The lack of conservation of semi-Lagrangian methods, however, is widely regarded as a serious disadvantage for hydraulic studies, where non-linear problems in which shocks may develop are often encountered. In this work we describe how to make the scheme conservative using an FCT approach. The method proposed does not guarantee an unconditional shock-capturing ability but is able to correctly reproduce the discontinuous flows common in open channel simulation without any shock-fitting algorithm. It is a cheap way to improve existing 1D semi-Lagrangian codes and allows stable calculations beyond the usual C F L limits. A basic semi-Lagrangian method is presented that provides excellent results for a linear problem; the new techniques allow us to tackle non-linear cases without unduly degrading the accuracy for the simpler problems. Two one-dimensional hydraulic problems are used as test cases, water hammer and dam break. In the latter case, because of the non-linearity, special care is needed with the low-order solution and we show the advantages of using Leveque's large-time step version of Roe's scheme for this purpose.