The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (67 page)

R
epairs on the spillways started in earnest in late August. With the dam’s turbines and generators still running at full capacity and the four river-outlet jet valves continuing to channel their blasts of water into the river, the construction crews brought in a special drilling machine and bored through the canyon walls to access the tunnels from the powerhouse deck. This enabled them to drive a fleet of cement trucks, backhoes, and other pieces of heavy machinery directly into the tunnels. Then dozens of workers embarked on the task of removing the debris while preparing the walls for
the latticework of rebar that would reinforce the new lining.

As this work proceeded, Dr. Henry Falvey, the bureau’s cavitation specialist back at the Hydraulics Lab in Denver, applied the finishing touches to a simple but elegant pair of air slots that were designed to neutralize the effects of cavitation. Falvey’s plan called for rings and troughs to be blasted four feet into the lining along the upper portions of both tunnels—an especially difficult job that was
performed by the Loizeaux family, a group of explosives experts who
would later handle much of the demolitions work at Ground Zero following the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When the work on the tunnels was complete
and the slots were finally tested, they introduced a cushion of air bubbles into the water racing through the spillways,
virtually eliminating the possibility of cavitation damage in the future.

The cost of all these repairs came to more than $32 million, a rather shocking price tag. As Reclamation officials would hasten
to point out to anyone who was willing to listen, those costs were offset by the additional hydropower generated by the excess water sent through the dam’s power plant during the crisis.
The sale of that electricity brought in $35 million. This calculation, however, did not account for the damage inflicted as the surge of high water passed through Hoover Dam—which was forced to open its own spillways—and into the lower Colorado, where
flooding overwhelmed hundreds of homes and businesses, contaminated ground wells, and took out public irrigation systems (infrastructure, it must be added, that had been built directly inside the flood zone
over the bureau’s objections).

When those costs were added to the rest of the bill, the total came to
more than $80 million, and on top of that, there were also several more fatalities. Six people drowned along the lower part of the Colorado
as the remnants of the flood raced past the town of Yuma, into Mexico, and finally spilled into the Sea of Cortés, which
received its largest infusion of freshwater in many years. But even the most adamant dam opponents had to concede that the destruction in 1983 was far less than what would have occurred if an unchained Colorado had run from the Rockies to the Pacific, as it had during the days of John Wesley Powell.

Nevertheless, in the court of public opinion anger over these events was vehement. Kim Crumbo, the Park Service ranger who had previously served as a SEAL in Vietnam, later put his finger on the question many people wanted answered.
“The bureau knew damn well they had too much water in Lake Powell,” he declared. “Why did they sit on so much water until it was too late?” The answer was forcefully articulated by Richard Bryan, the governor of Nevada, when he accused the bureau of losing control of the river through a
“monumental miscalculation.”

There was an element of truth to that charge; and as a result, Reclamation deserved to shoulder a hefty chunk of the blame. But amid the fury, some salient facts were ignored, beginning with the job that the engineers had pulled off. Years later, Tom Gamble, Phil Burgi, and Bruce Moyes, along with dozens of their colleagues, would look back on that summer as the most stressful but rewarding time of their careers. By preserving the spillway tunnels for as
long as possible, they had contained a crisis that had no precedent in hydroelectric engineering. And at the height of that crisis, they had stopped a runaway river by turning to one of the humblest tools one could imagine. Their plywood flashboards had saved the day.

None of this, however, precludes acknowledging that the system itself was, and remains, profoundly flawed. Among the many disturbing issues that it exposes, the runoff of 1983 calls into question why the bureau manages its entire series of dams and reservoirs according to a set of imperatives—the need to store water, to generate power, and to control floods—that are fundamentally opposed to one another. And flowing from that is the question of whether the task of meeting these competing demands compromises public welfare—an issue that is underscored by the still-lingering question of whether the safety of one of the largest dams in the United States had been jeopardized.

Of the two views on this, the first is supported by virtually every engineer and scientist who was involved with the spillway crisis. The caverns that were excavated at the base of the elbows inside the spillway tunnels confirmed Henry Falvey’s prediction that the worst of the cavitation-induced damage would drill downward, deep into the rock, and not backward toward the dam. As a result, the abutments remained intact and the safety of the dam was never compromised—an assessment that is supported by leading independent experts who have no direct affiliation with Reclamation.
“I haven’t seen anything that suggested the dam was in danger,” says J. David Rogers, a professor of geological engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology who is intimately familiar with Glen. “There are no serious questions about the integrity of the dam itself.”

The second view, which is shared by many of these same people, is that the events that unfolded at Glen should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and that the spillway crisis came far closer to disaster than should ever have been permitted—an idea that was perhaps voiced most chillingly by one of Reclamation’s own.

In 1997, a pair of reporters from the
Sacramento Bee
who were completing a series of articles on the safety of America’s dams interviewed John W. Keys, a civil and hydraulic engineer who had spent thirty-four years working for the bureau. Like his colleagues at Glen Canyon, Keys knew a thing or two about dams—at the time, he was completing a twelve-year stint as Reclamation’s Pacific Northwest regional director, and would later spend another five years as commissioner, the highest post in Reclamation.

“How close did we come to losing Glen Canyon in 1983?” asked Keys. “We came a hell of a lot closer than many people know.”

I wish to speak a word for Nature,
for absolute freedom and wilderness.

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

A
S
critics lashed out at the bureau and the repair work on the spillways went forward, there loomed the question of what, if anything, the Park Service intended to do about the stunt that Grua had pulled in the
Emerald Mile.

All summer long, as the river guides rode the remnants of the high water, the only thing that Martin Litton’s dorymen wanted to talk about was the speed run. Grua’s feat was the hottest piece of news on the river, and the guides were now folding it into their frame of reference by doing what guides did best, which was to tell the story over and over to themselves and anyone else who would listen. Despite the fact that Grua clearly had no intention of publicizing or capitalizing on the achievement, they were fiercely proud that the record had been so decisively nailed by a dory. Late at night on the boats, early in the morning while they guzzled their coffee,
they endlessly recounted what had taken place—how remarkable it was, how it could never be repeated, what a stellar achievement it represented.

Amid the backslapping and the bluster, however, were hints of something darker. The “eddy line”—the canyon’s network of gossip that conveyed information up and down the river—was now transmitting some troubling rumors suggesting
that the superintendent was on the warpath. Richard Marks was said to be livid and resolved to take drastic action. To ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again, he intended to make an example of Grua by hauling him into court, revoking his guide’s license, and banning him from the river for the rest of his life.

Partly in an effort to control a mounting sense of panic, Grua, who was fully booked with a series of midsummer commercial river trips,
grew indignant and angry. He castigated the Park Service for its pettiness and its overreach. He declared that Marks, who had never been a boatman and didn’t know the first thing about the river, wasn’t qualified to judge what the crew of the
Emerald Mile
had achieved. Meanwhile, however, Grua continued to fear the worst. When he got off the river in late July, he returned home to his trailer in Hurricane, opened up his mail, and saw his apprehensions confirmed in black and white.

The letter was addressed to Grua. Neither Petschek nor Wren was mentioned, and the wording was blunt:

“Enclosed is a citation for your participation in an illegal river trip. Your court date has been set for August 2 at 10:00 a.m.”

G
rua was scheduled to leave immediately on yet another trip, and thanks to his packed schedule for the rest of the guiding season, a series of continuances and delays followed. During this period,
Litton got busy and started working the phones from California, launching a campaign of backdoor diplomacy, hoping that his entreaties would convince the aggrieved superintendent to drop the charges. None of it worked, and by the beginning of November, as the river season drew to a close, Grua was out of excuses. It was time to face the music.

On a blustery autumn afternoon, Litton took his plane from San Francisco down to the Orange County airport and picked up Mike Meade, a former river passenger who was also an attorney and who had agreed, at Litton’s request, to represent Grua free of charge. The two men then flew east to Hurricane, where Litton touched down in a wind so strong they practically had to slip in sideways. When they opened the door for Grua, a gust of wind nearly tore the door off its hinges, forcing them to duct-tape it shut for the flight to the South Rim.

They arrived late in the day, skimming across a wintry canyon whose rims were dusted with snow and into which the cold, blue air had settled like smoke. They spent the night in a nearby motel, and the following morning they completed the short walk along Loop Road through the heart of Grand Canyon Village, the bustling little community where most tourists began and ended their encounter with the canyon.

Just down the street was El Tovar, the hotel perched on the rim where Litton and his wife had spent the first night of their honeymoon in the autumn of 1941. A few steps farther brought them to the former post office, a one-story lodge featuring a steeply gabled roof and log-cabin-style walls. Here, six mornings each week for many years, letters and packages had been dropped into a set of leather saddlebags and sent down the trail to Phantom Ranch,
one of only two postal addresses in the United States where the mail was still delivered by mule. Although the mule train still ran, the post office had recently been moved, and now the little log building, whose front porch was supported by peeled trunks of ponderosa pines, served as the most picturesque and romantic outpost of the federal justice system.

Each national park has its own federal magistrate’s courthouse, and in the autumn of 1983, presiding over the bench at Grand Canyon was Judge Thomas H. McKay, a former lawyer from Tucson whose face bore an expression of good-humored exasperation and weary decency that made him a dead ringer for the stand-up comedian Lewis Black. Over the years, McKay’s court had witnessed more than its fair share of petty crimes. He had recently presided over
a spate of cases involving hang-glider pilots who illegally plunged into the abyss, then folded up their gear and made a run for the rim before the rangers could catch them. Several arrests had also been made among
a band of hippies who were tending marijuana gardens at some extremely remote corners of the canyon.