Cadillac Desert (74 page)

At American Falls Dam, water was bursting furiously out of the outlet works. Ten thousand Bureau people and three million more downstream, all the way to the Pacific, held their collective breath as the reservoir began to fill early Monday morning. But the remains of the flood did not even overtop the spillway.

Eleven people died in the Teton flood, but the dam could just as easily have gone at two in the morning, in which case the toll could have risen into the thousands. Power and telephone lines between Sugar City and Rexburg were cut as soon as the flood struck, so the odds are there would have been no warning. The Bureau had installed no sensors below the dam to warn the towns if a flood was on the way.

Four thousand homes were damaged or destroyed; 350 businesses were lost. Damage estimates climbed to $2 billion, though settlements were to fall substantially short of that. Nothing, however, was as startling as what the flood had done to the land. The topsoil was gone from tens of thousands of acres—stripped off as if a plow a mile and a half wide had come along, scraping the earth down to bedrock. According to one estimate, more land was destroyed—permanently, made incapable of ever growing anything again—than would have been opened to irrigation by the dam.

That was merely the first in a long string of ironies that followed in the wake of the tragedy. As it turned out, the farmers on the Rexburg bench, the rich irrigators for whose benefit the dam was mainly built, were entirely spared. Their riverbottom neighbors, whose means of livelihood vanished with the flood, would have to search the region, the state, even the country to find a decent farm they could afford with their settlement money. But the farmers on the Rexburg bench could relax; they might not even miss the water they would now never receive. “A lot of wells have been drilled up on the bench,” explained Agriculture Commissioner Bill Kellogg, confirming what the dam’s opponents had been saying all along, “and the dam was only intended for supplemental water.” This same supplemental water—a life-or-death matter three days before—had suddenly become something they could do without. The dam’s opponents had argued that, too. But even had the irrigators on the benchlands been ruined for want of water, there were only a handful of them. There were thousands of victims on the floodplain below.

The politicians who had fought hardest for Teton Dam, such as Frank Church, were the first to pounce on the Bureau after the dam failed, the first to search the disaster for whatever political refuge could be found. Church castigated the Bureau for being “a prisoner of stale engineering ideas”; he made no apology for the stalest idea of all, the Congressional pork barrel. “No one told me the dam was going to break,” Church blustered when the local people, most of whom had wanted the dam as badly as he, tried to hold him responsible. Actually, Bob Curry had suggested just that to him three years earlier, when he wrote Church about the geologic defects of the site. Curry claims he never got a decent response.

As for the Bureau, it said as little as it could. Its reputation suddenly in shambles, it tried not to make a wretched situation worse. Its press releases after the catastrophe were a dry recitation of events. They were honest, but there was no hint of responsibility, not even sympathy for the flood’s victims, and no suggestion that perhaps the dam shouldn’t have been built.

None of Teton’s principal designers and builders were fired. Harold Arthur voluntarily retired—he had reached retirement age anyway—and started up a lucrative consulting business in Denver. Though he never publicly entertained a doubt about the dam, though he approved every major decision during its construction, though he vetoed a plan to install three grout curtains instead of one, not once during the interviews in 1982 and 1984 did Arthur display a hint of remorse. “One minute I hear the dam is fine and the next minute it’s failed,” Arthur told me. “There wasn’t anything
I
could do about it.” Donald Duck was twice passed over for promotion, took early retirement, and moved to Chicago, where he became a vice-president of the Harza engineering firm, which builds dams. Robbie Robison drifted off and disappeared; in 1984, no one seemed to have any idea where he was. Commissioner Gil Stamm was, always, wooden as a cigar-store Indian. “I ran into Stamm in Washington after the dam went,” his old friend Floyd Dominy said. “I said to him, ‘Jesus Christ, haven’t you committed suicide yet?’ He just smiled,” said Dominy. “He just smiled.”

To this day, no one is exactly sure what caused the collapse of Teton Dam, though several million dollars were spent on four independent investigations to figure it out. It might have been a leaky joint between the foundation and the dam. It might have been a flaw in the impervious core of the dam itself. It might have been poor filler material. It might have been expansion and contraction caused by ice that formed during winter construction. The theory Harold Arthur maintained is “incredible, virtually impossible”—that water drifted around the grout curtain on the right side and immediately went back into the dam, turning it to mud—is the one that one former Bureau engineer, who would rather not be named, believes is the likeliest explanation. “With the other theories, you can blame it on the contractors,” he says. “With the grout-curtain theory, you’re saying it was a lousy design. But that’s why it failed. All the other theories are so much b.s.”

However, among all the ironies that piled up in the aftermath of the Teton tragedy, everything pales beside one: there are a lot of voices in Idaho calling for the dam to be rebuilt. When a plague of locusts struck Utah after the first Mormons arrived, huge flocks of migrating seagulls flew in and ate them up. When clouds of disease-ridden flies and mosquitos appeared in the wake of the Teton debacle, the same thing happened again, so the Mormon irrigation confederacy of southern Idaho has apparently decided that God, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is still on its side. On December 10, 1976, only half a year after the disaster, the Idaho Water Users’ Association issued a resolution calling for a “safe” Teton Dam to be rebuilt at or near the same site. Harold Arthur still believes he could design a dam at the Teton site that would not collapse, though no one seems inclined to let him try. His suggestion, offered in muted tones, came as close to an apology as anything he said.

The economics of the project are worse than ever, and with so much of the arid West screaming for more projects—projects that, for whole regions, are really a matter of life or death, at least if irrigation is to continue—it would be hard to justify an irrigation project for farmers still putting ten feet of water on their land. None of this is to suggest, however, that the tragedy of Teton Dam might not be repeated somewhere else. Colorado, for example.

F
lowing through Denver, the South Platte River appears so insignificant it is hard to believe it is the city’s main water supply, let along the sustenance of hundreds of thousands of irrigated acres downstream in Colorado and Nebraska. The South Platte is a mere fork of the main Platte, itself a tributary of the Missouri, itself a child of the Father of Waters. From a plane climbing up from Stapleton Airport, the South Platte is seen to meander forlornly out of town until it is quickly swallowed, as everything is, by the surreal endlessness of the Great Plains. Viewed from a low bluff two hundred miles downriver, it still appears of no consequence. The bottomlands are a tangle of shrubs and barbed wire interspersed with cottonwoods, and they are grazed bare by cows, which stare uncomprehendingly from the muck. It is a river without pretensions, haggard and used-looking, like a bag lady. In August, near the Nebraska border, the river dries up completely; all that reaches Nebraska is the underground flow. The Platte is one of the most hungrily used rivers in the entire world, surpassing even the Colorado. However, as far as the state of Colorado is concerned, it is not used enough.

The South Platte is one of two rivers left in Colorado that isn’t utterly and irrevocably appropriated, now and forever. To a state which is second to California in the arid West in population, industry, and irrigated acreage—but which has at its disposal about one-tenth as much water—the fact that some 7 percent of its share of the river still escapes to Nebraska is a fact of overarching significance. That the Bureau of Reclamation has offered to build an enormous dam across it to attempt to correct that situation is another. This last glimmering promise, in the face of a hopeless, nonnegotiable finality, has been enough to lead the members of Colorado’s political establishment into a world of fantasy, leaving both their senses and their principles behind.

Don Christenson’s crew cut stands up about an inch and a half, like a brush. A three-hundred-pound bear could nest down in that hair for the night and in the morning, after the bear lumbered off, it would spring right back up. The rest of Christenson fits the hairstyle: he is lean, weathered, bronzed as a Comanche. His jaw is made of cast iron. The one anomaly in his all-American countenance is a thick, voluptuous set of lips. In 1979, at the annual Conference on Rivers and Water Policy in Washington, D.C.—better known as the Damfighters’ Conference—Christenson, surrounded by longhairs, environmental lawyers, bureaucrats, and kayakers, stood out like the man from Mars.

Christenson’s presence at the Damfighters’ Conference was a signal event. Unofficially, he was the first verifiable irrigation farmer who had ever attended the conference. He was probably one of the first who had ever opposed a dam, but he had a good reason. The Bureau of Reclamation, having nearly run out of decent damsites, had finally decided to turn the Reclamation Act inside out. It was going to flood out a bunch of small farmers so it could give supplemental water to a bunch of bigger farmers, several of whom would be in violation of the Reclamation Act. Christenson was one of the small farmers, and he was the one with the biggest mouth, so the Bureau wanted to drown him with a vengeance.

When Don Christenson’s father settled in the Weldon Valley in 1926, there was already talk of a big dam at the Narrows of the South Platte, four or five miles downstream from his land. The first serious proposal seems to have emerged in 1908. The farm, the whole town of Weldona, and everything else from bluff to bluff for thirteen miles was to go under, but the elder Christenson refused to let the prospect faze him. “Dad would tell us, ‘Maybe they are gonna build it. But maybe they’re not gonna build it. Maybe they’re gonna build it but they’re not gonna build it for thirty years. I’m not going to sit here and let the goddamned government worry me to death. We’re gonna farm our land and live a normal life and keep our property up, and to hell with them.’ ” His prophecy was remarkable. Finally authorized in 1944 as one of three-hundred-odd projects in the Pick-Sloan Act, the Narrows Project had still not been built forty years later.

The senior Christenson’s attitude managed to infect all three of his sons, who raise their crops, paint their houses, fix their equipment, and otherwise carry on as if the threat of a dam did not exist. The same cannot be said, however, for the Weldon Valley as a whole. Weldona has the look of a town losing hope: houses unpainted, shutters askew, eerily quiet. “The people who’ve just decided to let their ol’ house decay may be the smart ones,” Christenson says bitterly. “Why spend $15,000 to fix up your property when you know the Bureau of Reclamation”—he pronounces it “
Bee
-yoor-o”—“is gonna tell you your house is a slum anyway when they make you an offer?”

The Weldon Valley was settled in the 1870s, only forty years before the first proposal for a Narrows Dam; for most of its existence it has been threatened with extinction. Any day, any hour, someone might appear on one’s front lawn to survey; someone might amble up one’s walk with a sheaf of papers and an offer to sign or else. It is bad enough to live like this; it is worse to live under the shadow of a project as nonsensical as the Narrows Dam. And it becomes almost ludicrous if there is a distinct possibility that the dam, once built, may not hold water and could conceivably collapse, rendering seventy-five years of worry, agony, and divisiveness for naught. This has been Don Christenson’s fate since the day he was born.

The dam will be immense—an earthen monster. Twenty-two thousand four hundred feet long, it would stretch, if laid across Washington, D.C.—which is where Christenson suggests it ought to be built—from outer Georgetown to the Capitol. In New York, it would stretch from the Empire State Building to the Staten Island Ferry. For all its length, it would be only 147 feet high, and the reservoir behind it would be drawn down much of the time, which has prompted its critics to rename the project “the Shallows.” How anything this monumental—one of the largest dams on earth, longer even that the main dam of Itaipu, longer than Fort Peck—could be built for $226 million (the official cost estimate as of 1980) is anyone’s guess. Actually, a great part of that expenditure—probably half—wouldn’t even be used to build the dam. It would go to 844 landowners to pay compensation for the ninety-five farms, twenty-eight businesses, two churches, and elementary school that would be put underwater. It would also be used to relocate twenty-six miles of the Union Pacific’s track and twenty miles of State Route 144. The remainder of the money would somehow erect a four-mile-long dam.

The Narrows Reservoir would submerge fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand acres of productive, privately irrigated farmland, none of which has ever received the kind of subsidy the beneficiaries of Narrows would automatically get. (This is some of the oldest continuously irrigated land in the West; the Weldon Valley ditch was dug by human and horse muscle in 1881.) Another forty thousand acres of unirrigated grazing land would also be drowned or affected. Some local waterfowl habitat would be harmed, but the real damage to nature would be downstream. Flows in the hugely depleted South Platte, which are already critically low for the three-quarters of a million ducks and geese and the migrating whooping and sandhill cranes—the entire surviving U.S. population of whoopers—for which the river is a crucial feeding and resting spot, would be further reduced. Although the amount of water diverted would not be much—for a dam of such size and cost, it would be pathetic—its absence would be sorely felt by the waterfowl. On top of this, the concentration of fertilizers, pesticides, and sewage—Denver’s and Fort Collins’s—in the river would become worse.