Cadillac Desert (69 page)

Wyoming has had its share of powerful politicians in recent decades, from Senator Joseph O‘Mahoney, who stopped FDR’s plan to pack the Supreme Court, to Senator Gale McGee, Lyndon Johnson’s most articulate ally on the subject of Vietnam. What the economy of their high, harsh, hot, arid, and bitterly cold state could not produce on its own, they could produce for it out of the national treasury. The growing season in the region is extremely short: the altitude of most agricultural land is between four thousand and seven thousand feet, and there is frost nine months of the year, sometimes even in August. The land is useless for growing anything but cattle browse. To build an expensive dam, a spillway, an outlet works, and canals in order to grow grass or alfalfa is not generally an economically rewarding proposition. It can, however, be a politically rewarding one. To paraphrase what someone said about pleasure and pain, economics are an illusion, while politics are real. Besides, as Wyoming’s politicians never tired of pointing out, their state had contributed substantial mineral royalties to the Reclamation Fund, and they were supposed to get some projects in return. If they didn’t, Wyoming’s share of the Colorado River—all of it contained in its biggest tributary, the Green—might disappear down California’s maw.

The leak began as a wet spot on the downstream face of the dam which first appeared on the 3rd or 4th of September and grew steadily larger. By the evening of the 6th it was a small waterspout. A waterspout is a signal that water is piping inside the dam—forming placer-nozzle velocities and excavating channels which allow the dam to be eaten from within. By the time Barney Bellport flew overhead, Fontenelle Dam was firehosing water from its downstream face. It appeared too late to save it.

“We left as soon as it was light enough to see,” Bellport remembered. “Wyoming seems like a mighty big state when you’re flying across most of it to inspect a leaking dam. After we made a pass over the dam, I didn’t need to make another. I was really worried that we were going to lose it.” The Bureau plane landed at nearby Kemmerer, the improbable site of the first J. C. Penney store. The chief engineer then roared overland toward the Green River, wondering whether he could get there in time to save his reputation.

It would have been one thing if the dam were newly completed and the reservoir pool just forming behind it. But Fontenelle had, oddly enough, held water for some weeks; filling the reservoir had given no indication that some serious trouble lay inside the dam or bedrock. The reservoir was therefore full, and had to be emptied fast. “My project engineer hadn’t begun emptying it because the contractor was downstream fixing the apron of the power plant,” Bellport recalled, sounding still disgusted with the man. “I asked him if he would rather wash away the contractor’s equipment or the town of Green River.” With the dam hemorrhaging across a wide section of its face—huge burps of muddy water were gushing out of it, as if it were gagging on the reservoir and vomiting it up—Bellport ordered both outlet works opened full-bore. The water that was being stored to irrigate the surrounding high desert began flooding uselessly over it, reverting a large piece of Wyoming to something it had not been since the last Ice Age: a swamp. The outlet works carried off so much water so fast that the reservoir could be seen dropping visibly, like a bathtub. A crowd of tiny figures watched tensely from the canyon rim. Forty miles downriver sat the town of Green River, exposed and vulnerable, right on the riverbank. “You felt like you do when you’re passing another car and suddenly there’s an oncoming car coming right at you,” Bellport recalled. “You’ve got to keep passing but your heart’s fluttering and you wonder why you didn’t buy a car with more pickup.” Only in this case the almost unbearable tension was to last for hours instead of seconds. The outlet works could empty the reservoir only so fast; the dam was still belching out great surges of muddy water; its downstream face was steadily eroding under the force. Downriver, there were already reports that the rising Green was inundating the town golf course. Volunteers were furiously sandbagging the river’s banks.

The Bureau was lucky. By early evening, the force of the huge leak finally began to expire. As the flow subsided, one could see the frightening gouges and gullies that the exit of superpressurized water had caused in the downstream face. The dam looked as if it had been pounded by artillery shells. But, miraculously, it had held.

In 1983, sitting in retirement in Rossmoor, California, Barney Bellport still echoes the attitude of the Bureau of Reclamation during the whole affair. When speaking of the crisis itself, he allows himself an excursion into melodrama. “It was damn serious,” he says.
“We really thought we were going to lose it.”
But then, having talked himself through the incident, he jumps to his own and the Bureau’s defense, like the sinner who avoided being caught and therefore believes he didn’t sin. “We repaired it, and it held,” he says. “It’s been holding water ever since. The Bureau has built hundreds of dams, and they’ve all held beautifully, except Teton.” That, it is suggested, was a pretty large exception. Bellport pauses, looks ironically at his wife, and lets his gaze drink in his surroundings. “Teton,” he says firmly, “was either an act of God or human error. You do not blame an organization with a single blemish on its record for the mistakes—if they were mistakes—of a handful of employees who didn’t live up to its reputation.”

There is not now—there was not then—much evidence of soul-searching on the part of the Bureau’s leadership, old or new. They did not seem to be asking themselves what they were doing building potentially dangerous dams like Fontenelle to serve demonstrably wasteful projects like Seedskadie. No one seemed to be wondering whether a bad project might not, through some Shakespearean inevitability, lead to a worse end.

Actually, that is not quite true. Pat Dugan was wondering, and so was Dave Crandall, the regional director in Salt Lake, whose office had to deal with the Fontenelle aftermath. Judging from the correspondence he carried on with his superiors in the wake of the near-disaster—correspondence that traveled the blue-envelope route—Crandall seemed to sense what the others did not: that the Bureau had committed the sin of pride. In a letter to Bellport, he mentioned a demand by some local citizens—people who would have to spend their lives immediately below a dam that had almost failed—asking that the Bureau convene a major investigation before rebuilding the dam. “I do not accede to threats,” Crandall wrote, “but since there is this feeling in the local area, and also to preserve our position of impartiality and objectivity, I urge that you consider a Board of Review to appraise the repairs at Fontenelle.” Such a board, Crandall pointedly added, should include “qualified non-Bureau non-federal professionals.”

To this, Bellport’s response was a peremptory harrumph. Ignoring Crandall, he took the matter directly to Commissioner Floyd Dominy. “As you know, the principal competence in earth dam design and construction lies within the Bureau,” Bellport wrote to Dominy. “I strongly suspect that a review of the competent earth dam people in consulting firms throughout the country would reveal that a considerable portion of them have either Bureau or Corps background. I also take a very dim view,” Bellport offered, “of a professor of geology from a university sitting in judgment on the Bureau.”

However, what Bellport’s “professor” might have told him, had he and the Bureau felt like listening, was that it had just about run out of good damsites. As Fontenelle was an inferior site compared with Flaming Gorge, as Glen Canyon was inferior to Hoover, as Auburn was vastly inferior to Shasta (but four times as expensive, even allowing for inflation), the Bureau was now being forced to build on sites it had rejected forty, fifty, or sixty years earlier. It was building on them because while the ideal damsites had rapidly disappeared, the demand for new projects had not. The demand for new projects had, if anything, increased, especially now that the Reclamation Act had been amended and re-amended to such a degree that federally supplied water was the closest thing left to a free good. The West and the Congress wanted more projects, and the Bureau wanted more work, but the good damsites were gone. The Bureau, of course, rationalized its decision to keep on building by claiming that advances in engineering were keeping up with the challenges. Even though it was now building dams on rotten foundation rock, between spongy sandstone abutments, in slide-prone canyons, and close to active earthquake faults, the dams held—for now.

“The country around Fontenelle is trona country,” Barney Bellport says. “It’s full of sodium carbonate—soda ash. The stuff speeds up the setting of concrete. We finally figured out that it had made the concrete we poured for the grout curtains set too fast. Somewhere it left a fissure where the water got through and entered the dam. After that we knew to mix and pour concrete in trona country that wouldn’t set so fast.”

Pat Dugan essentially agrees. “There hasn’t been an ideal damsite since 1940,” he says. “Every site we’ve built on since then would probably have scared hell out of a nineteenth-century engineer. But you wouldn’t feel safe going a hundred miles per hour in a Model T, either, if you could get it going that fast down a hill. You might feel perfectly safe in a Porsche.” That might be true, except that the dams built at less than ideal locations are usually larger than those built at the earlier, better sites, and with so many dams now in place one dam’s failure could conceivably cause other dams to fail, resulting in a domino of disasters unlike anything the country has ever seen. The failure of one large, strategically placed dam (Glen Canyon, for example, which would surely take out Hoover as it went) could undo much of what the Bureau of Reclamation has built up over seventy years, leaving southern California a desert underwater and the economy of the Southwest in ruins.

A modest version of that is what might have happened when Teton Dam collapsed. What actually happened was bad enough.

W
hen Bob Curry got his first look at a cross section of the Teton damsite, his reaction was much like Pat Dugan’s when he looked at his finished cross section of Fontenelle. “Holy Christ!” Curry, a geologist, remembers thinking to himself. “What a terrible site for a dam!” By then, however, the dam was already one-quarter completed.

The French colonizers of what is now Chad informally divided their hollow prize into two separate nations. The south was
Chad utile
— “useful Chad”—and the north was
Chad inutile.
In the south, which delved into the fringes of the Central African rainbelt, you could raise a crop; there was wildlife. Northern Chad was deep in the Sahara, as barren as Antarctica. One’s first impression af Idaho is much the same, only the polarity is reversed. Northern Idaho is green and welcoming; it is beautiful. Close enough to the Pacific to be influenced by its storehouse of winter warmth, mountainous enough to wring moisture out of passing weather, northern Idaho is the banana belt of the Rockies—warmer than the mountains of New Mexico a thousand miles to the south, wetter than eastern Oregon and Washington to the West. Wild rivers pour out of the mountains—the Salmon, the Clearwater, the Lochsa, the Boise, the Pend Oreille. Apple and cherry orchards thrive in the valleys. In the middle is a vast wilderness, the Salmon River breaks—the most expansive roadless area in the coterminous United States.

Northern Idaho, however, doesn’t count much in the economic scheme of things. Real Idaho, serious-minded Idaho, is in the south, along the desolate reaches of the Snake River’s old volcanic plain. Like barnacles on an anchor chain, Idaho’s cities, its most productive farmland, and much of its wealth are strung along the Snake as it loops around the southern half of the state. Thanks to irrigation, it is a useless place made rich; nowhere except in Arizona and California’s Central Valley has such an utter transformation been wrought in the West. Twenty miles from either side of the Snake there is little but desert, and more desert, and rockpiles of basaltic tuff. It was exactly this sort of landscape that appealed to early Mormons, who found a place attractive in exact proportion to its ability to repel anyone else. Drifting up from Salt Lake Basin, the Mormons glimpsed the Snake, incongruously big in the desert, and immediately saw a future. Diverting the few smaller streams, they made a tentative beachhead; then the Bureau of Reclamation arrived and built Jackson Lake and Minidoka and American Falls dams, and the beachhead became an invasion. Within the forty-mile corridor along the Snake River now exists an irrigation economy that has given Idaho a higher percentage of millionaires than any other state in the nation. The best-known crop is potatoes, which like their soil loose, friable, a little sandy, and well drained—the exact conditions of the Snake River Plain. One of the problems of Idaho irrigation farming, in fact, is that water, in places, tends to drain through the soil too quickly, requiring annual waterings in excess of ten feet. That, in part, is how Teton Dam came to be built.

The fountainhead of southern Idaho’s agricultural wealth lies to the northeast, where the Yellowstone plateau and the Grand Teton Mountains produce enough water to engorge the Snake to substantial size before it enters the state. On a bright day, the Grand Tetons are visible from the eastern reaches of the plain; a huge buttress wall facing north-south, ninety miles long and thirteen thousand feet high, the range wrings a lot of water out of passing Pacific storms. On the western side the runoff gathers into two rivers, the Henry’s Fork and the Teton, which ultimately join the Snake above Idaho Falls. The Teton is, or was, the prettier river; for thirty miles, it whipsawed through a low, U-shaped canyon amid cottonwoods along the bottom and conifers that walked up the canyon’s collapsed slopes. An oasis stream in a landscape that is at best austere, the Teton was coveted by the deer that wintered in its canyon, by the fat trout darting from pool to pool and by the humans who thought it could be put to better use. Since the 1920s and before, there was talk of a dam somewhere on the river, but the dam was never built. One reason can be seen in the granular rock of the canyon’s steep slopes. The geology of the region is ultravolcanic: the rock is fissured, fractionated, cavitated, and criss-crossed by minor faults. The neighboring farmland, meanwhile, though productive enough, requires inordinate amounts of water. Those two drawbacks add up to poor economics, and though a Teton Dam was studied and restudied through the 1940s and 1950s, it was never built—until the 1960s.