The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (37 page)

I
n the southern Rockies, the snow typically starts to taper off in late March, and by April Fools’ Day, a warming trend—a
gradual
warming trend—has set in. The mechanics of a normal melt-off roughly mirror what happens when a child accidentally drops an ice cream cone on a hot sidewalk. As ambient temperatures slowly increase, the snowpack loses its rigidity and slumps to a gooey liquid at a gently measured pace, which ensures that the runoff doesn’t suddenly come roaring down off the mountains all at once.

During the early 1980s, the job of tracking this process within the Colorado River basin fell on the shoulders of two obscure government agencies. At higher elevations, the US Soil Conservation Service, a little-known division of the Department of Agriculture, maintained a network of snow-telemetry devices that monitored the depth of the snowpack. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service, which was part of the Department of Commerce, operated a system of precipitation gauges at lower elevations. In the same manner that the Colorado and the Green merge at their confluence, these two streams of data flowed together and became one inside a rust-colored building located on the edge of the Salt Lake City airport, where a team of
seven hydrologists ran the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, one of thirteen offices around the country that are responsible for monitoring major river basins in the United States.

The center was run by a sandy-haired maverick named Gerry Williams, who enjoyed hunting deer and javelina in his spare time, and was fiercely defensive about his office’s prerogatives. The walls of Williams’s office were thickly plastered with large satellite maps that spit through an oversize facsimile machine each hour, providing blueprints of weather systems stretching from the Bering Sea to Japan and across the entire western United States. Thanks to those
maps, Williams and his team enjoyed a highly refined picture of a world that extended far beyond the northern quadrant of Utah—but had almost no direct connection to the river system that was driven by the weather that they monitored and analyzed. In the spring of 1983, however, all of that changed.

Williams was a veteran with more than twenty years of experience, and
the information that was streaming into his office was unlike anything he had ever seen. In the mountains and valleys of the upper Colorado basin, the snowpack in January had burgeoned to 14 percent above normal, but in February and March little new snow had fallen and the snowpack actually dropped to about 5 percent
below
the average. In April, however, the snowpack increased again, and then in May the train start running off the rails. As late-season storms dropped their loads while keeping temperatures well below normal until halfway through the month, the snow-telemetry gauges indicated that the snowpack was increasing dramatically.
Then on Saturday, May 28, as if someone had flipped some sort of meteorological switch, the temperatures abruptly shot into the high eighties, rousing all that snow from its cold slumber and sending it racing downhill. One of the places that bore the brunt of this initial onslaught was Salt Lake City.

During the first week in June, every major stream in the Salt Lake Valley was overflowing. Up in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, on the eastern edge of town, residents attended to the sinister sound of boulders pounding down the channels as the torrents of snowmelt rearranged the streambeds. Realizing that this onrush was heading directly for the center of town, local officials put out an emergency call for volunteers, and within hours some six thousand citizens—schoolteachers, bus drivers, off-duty firefighters, and anyone else who was prepared to lend a hand—got in line and started diking both sides of Salt Lake’s three main thoroughfares with a wall of nearly a million sandbags. City engineers then routed the floodwaters into these canals, instantly transforming the capital of Mormondom into a desert version of Venice. For the next week, pedestrians would make their way across the center of town along a series of wooden footbridges while kayakers merrily paddled down the midstream current.

Williams and his hydrologists were forced to circumvent the morning traffic snarls created by those makeshift rivers on their way to work, and when they arrived at their office, they were confronted with further evidence that the phenomenon unfolding before their eyes had
no precedent in the thirty years during which anything approaching accurate and detailed weather records had been kept in the upper Colorado River basin. Never before had so much snow fallen so late in the season.
Never before had it melted off with such shocking abruptness.

These developments presented Williams with two problems. First, the events lay well beyond the range of statistical possibilities embedded in the multiple-regression models that his team was using to predict the river’s flow. Second, it was painfully evident that
the government simply had not placed enough snow-and-rain telemetry monitors and precipitation gauges to build an accurate assessment of the speed and volume of the runoff. Moreover, because much of the snowpack had accumulated in the late spring,
far less water had been lost to evaporation and infiltration. All of this meant that as the melt-off accelerated, Williams’s computerized programs could neither keep pace with these changes nor integrate them into any meaningful predictions about how much water was actually funneling into the Colorado.
“Our models are among the best in the world, but they are only as sophisticated as the current data network,” Williams informed the
Denver Post.
“You can’t go in and completely model an entire basin in a two-week period.”

In effect, Williams and his hydrologists were trapped in a losing game of catch-up that had started at the end of March and refused to level out. In the past, the runoff had been so predictable that the River Forecast Center had not even bothered revising its forecasts beyond the first of May. Now, in early June, they were putting out revisions every seventy-two hours—yet each stream-flow forecast they issued was immediately rendered inaccurate by a deluge of more snowmelt. The amount of water that was racing through the river system was building by leaps and bounds, and Williams’s forecasts—which, among other things, provided the basis on which officials at the Bureau of Reclamation were deciding how much water to release downstream from each of their dams along the Colorado—bore
almost no resemblance to what the river was actually doing.

T
he exodus of snowmelt began in the Never Summers, a cluster of high peaks located fifty-three miles northwest of Denver in the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park, where an idyllic meadow cups the headwaters of the Colorado. Swollen with frigid inflow from countless freshets and small creeks, the river rapidly built into a torrent whose strength and volume increased as its downstream tributaries added their own discharges to the main current: the Fraser and the Muddy, the Blue and the Eagle, the Roaring Fork and the Fryingpan and the Crystal.

After blasting out of the mountains and jetting across the orchard-studded piedmont of western Colorado, the river reached the town of Grand Junction and picked up the Gunnison. Then it turned left and made a beeline toward
the Utah badlands, hurtling through Westwater Canyon and gathering up the waters of the Dolores and the San Miguel, before rushing past the town of Moab and boring into the heart of Canyonlands National Park. There, beneath a towering mesa called Island in the Sky, the Colorado picked up the entire discharge of the Green, which was hauling the runoff from its own network of tributaries whose waters extended all the way to Wyoming.

Below this confluence, the Colorado throttled through Cataract Canyon, then drilled its way toward the Dirty Devil, the last northern tributary above the entrance to the Grand Canyon. By this point, the fourth-longest river system in the continental United States had become a watery express train
freighting the runoff of a region whose landmass
approached the size of Poland. The National Weather Service’s river gauges indicated that this torrent was now approaching 100,000 cfs, which was something to behold. A flood of such magnitude had not been witnessed anywhere on the Colorado in more than a quarter of a century—although that figure had some important qualifications.

Before the Bureau of Reclamation constructed its phalanx of dams on the Colorado and its major tributaries, spring runoffs with a peak discharge of 120,000 cfs occurred, on average, once every three years—and floods of considerably greater magnitude were hardly unusual.
In the summer of 1921, for example, the Colorado had reached 170,000. And on July 8, 1884, thanks to torrential rainfall triggered by the severe atmospheric disruptions following the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa,
the flooding may have surpassed 240,000, the highest level ever recorded. (A precise calibration of this discharge was impossible because the gauges were submerged by the current; but
a cat trapped in an apple tree enabled experts to make some credible extrapolations.) Moreover, historical debris deposits reveal that even larger floods have taken place in the distant past. On roughly
a dozen occasions during the last forty-five hundred years, the Colorado has approached 300,000 cfs. At least once, the river may actually have flirted with 500,000, a level comparable to the average discharge of the Mississippi.

As these numbers illustrate, the size of the runoff making its way toward the Grand Canyon in early June of 1983 was hardly a record-setter. But two additional conditions rendered what was about to unfold both unique and rather chilling. First, it was rare to see the runoff explode out of the mountains so swiftly and materialize as a single, solid rush. Second, and equally significant, just downstream from the mouth of the Dirty Devil, the Colorado’s current abruptly collided with the northernmost tentacles of Lake Powell, at the far end of which the river’s progress was impeded—for the moment—by the 710-foot-high ramparts of the Glen Canyon Dam.

In its twenty-year life span, the dam had never been required to handle an onrush of this magnitude, and thanks to the speed with which it had arrived, the Bureau of Reclamation was caught completely flat-footed. Having failed to draw down the level of the reservoir to a level that would accommodate this flood, Reclamation would now be forced to confront the unpleasant reality that the snowmelt was pouring into Powell almost twice as fast as it could be drained out through the dam’s penstocks and river outlets. With each passing day, the surface of the reservoir was inching closer and closer to the concrete lip on the parapet of the dam. Moreover, as the team of men who were in charge of that dam were about to discover, the only tool at their fingertips for handling this emergency was about to suffer a catastrophic breakdown, pitching them into a crisis that had no precedent in the history of hydroelectric engineering.

Among the sixty-four Reclamation employees who worked at Glen—the operators on Dick White’s Control Room team, the power-system electricians and the machinists, the work foremen and the heavy laborers, the secretaries and maintenance personnel—the challenges of that crisis would fall most heavily on the shoulders of one person, the man who was in charge of the entire billion-dollar, ten-million-ton edifice.

I.
Although the El Niño of 1982–83 was the largest on record up to that point, it has since been surpassed by several subsequent southern oscillation events.

Rivers, rivers, we can never—

well, hardly ever—have enough of them.

—E
DWARD
A
BBEY

T
OM
Gamble was a trim, forty-six-year-old Californian with wire-rimmed glasses and a shock of brown hair that was well on its way to becoming white. By June of 1983, he had been serving as Glen’s power operations manager for nine years, and as the Bureau of Reclamation’s top man at the dam, the buck stopped with him—an arrangement that suited his personality rather well.

Unlike Kenton Grua and the rest of the boatmen who had fallen under the spell of the Colorado deep inside the Grand Canyon, Gamble placed little value on the charms of free-flowing rivers. His interest in running water was pragmatic—rooted in neither aesthetics nor romance, but in a hard-nosed sense of appreciation for the energy that rivers contain and a deep respect for the discipline and skill it takes to harness that power for the benefit of human beings. In Gamble’s view, there wasn’t a stretch of white water anywhere whose excitement could match the thrill of watching eight Frances turbines transform the mechanical energy of the Colorado into pure electricity. For him, Glen wasn’t simply a magnificent machine that brought a wild river under control. This was where power was
created
.

As the son of an electrician who spent most of his career in the lumber mills
of rural Oregon, Gamble’s childhood had unfolded in a series of industrial encampments where the trunks of towering trees were transformed into raw lumber. He started work early, driving forklifts at the age of ten, and by his early teens he was unloading massive logging trucks by night. During those years, he acquired a passion for the tools and the accoutrements of the trade—the sledgehammers and the giant band saws, the hydraulic jacks and the steel-toed boots, the draglines and the knuckle-boom loaders. With time, he also formed an abiding affinity for the men (and they were invariably men) who made their livings with those tools: the furious bursts of energy they flung into their jobs; the ingenuity of their problem solving, especially when it came to fixing heavy machinery; and the values they forged and instilled through brute labor.