Cadillac Desert (73 page)

The construction man immediately phoned Robison, who drove out at eighty miles an hour. By the time he arrived another leak had developed, almost exactly at the contact point of the dam with the abutment. Robison quickly ordered one of his men to try to divert the flow away from the powerhouse with a bulldozer. Then, at last, he decided to call his superiors in Washington, Denver, and Boise.

A Bureau report later said, “The project supervisors did not believe at this time that the safety of the dam was jeopardized.”

At about nine-thirty, one of the men noticed an odd-looking shadow on the downstream face of the dam, twenty feet or so out from the right abutment. He looked at the sky. There was no cloud anywhere. The shadow was a wet spot. In a few more minutes it was a spring. Then it was a creek. Then it was a sizable torrent washing away the embankment of the dam. Robbie Robison called the sheriffs of Madison and Fremont counties and told them to prepare to evacuate twelve thousand people.

Watching the unprecedented spectacle beneath him, Robison was biting his lip until it almost bled. He thought of the main outlet works and did a quick mental calculation of how long it would take to open it. He decided hours, maybe a day, maybe two. He told his men to try anyway. Then he ordered a second bulldozer down to try to shove material into the widening hole. The two big Caterpillars crawled across the dam face like flies on a wall. As fast as they could plug the hole, the torrent swept away what they had filled in. The hole was now a crater, as large as a swimming pool. It was vomiting muddy water in rapid heaves.

At that same moment, a family of tourists was driving up the access road from Sugar City to take a look at the newly completed dam. It was just an unplanned side trip, prompted mainly by the sign at the junction of the access road with Highway 33 that proudly announced the existence of the dam. Through such a chance excursion, David Schleicher’s wish was about to be fulfilled. On the seat of the car was a movie camera, loaded with film.

Nothing could plug the hole in the downstream face. After twenty minutes one of the Caterpillars fell halfway into it. Terrified as he was, the operator of the other dozer frantically tried to winch it out. Meanwhile, on the other side of the dam, a more ominous phenomenon was occurring. A whirlpool had begun to develop in the reservoir a few yards away from the face of the dam. Like the whirlpool over the outlet of an emptying bathtub, the vortex could only mean that water was leaving the reservoir in a hurry, and was sluicing directly through the dam. Two more dozer operators crawled down the canyon slope and onto the upstream side of the dam, shoving riprap from the embankment into the swirling hole. One of them was named Jay Calderwood. Jay Calderwood, like almost everyone else in the area, was a Mormon. “Every pass I made I wondered whether it would be my last,” he recalled later. “I though, ‘Well, Jay old boy, this is it. I’m going to go. Have I lived the righteous life my parents taught me?’ I felt very close to the Lord at this time. I had Him on my mind all the time, when I was trying to stop the leak and save the dam. ‘This is it, I can’t do a bit of good at what I’m doing. But I’ll go out fighting. I’ll not be a coward.’ ”

Meanwhile, on the downstream side of the dam, the two bulldozers were still trying to plug the huge spring gushing out of the embankment. It was now regurgitating the dam’s insides by the cubic yard. The audience on the canyon rim, which had grown to include a couple of local radio reporters, was helplessly spellbound. At almost exactly eleven-thirty, the sides of the hole suddenly collapsed some more, widening it by twenty feet. The Caterpillars began to drop as if through a trapdoor, two huge yellow machines in slow-motion aerial freefall. Both drivers launched themselves out of their seats and ran for safety along the dam’s crest and up the canyon slope.

Now one could only watch. Robbie Robison, trembling and licking blood off his punctured lip, may still have been telling himself it couldn’t happen. The dam was too big, too solid. It could not be moved. At eleven fifty-five, the crest of the dam fell into the reservoir as if a sword had whacked it off. Two minutes later, as the movie camera whirred in the hands of a speechless tourist, the second-largest flood in North America since the last Ice Age was heading out the Teton River Canyon.

The dam went almost noiselessly. It didn’t so much break as melt. One second there was a dam, three hundred feet high and seventeen hundred feet wide at the base; the next minute it was gone. Actually, two-thirds of it was somehow left standing as the flood roared through the bombed-out hole on the right side. The reservoir spilled out in a great, fat, smooth, probing tongue; then, a couple of hundred yards downstream, it suddenly erupted into a boil about fifteen stories high. For a moment, the spectators on the canyon rim thought it might consume them; then it boomed off in a heart-stopping chaos of boils, whirlpools, and fifty-foot waves. The initial rapids resembled Lava Falls on the Colorado River, a Colorado River with two million cubic second-feet of water. The color was an awful brown.

Six miles beyond the dam, the Teton Canyon abruptly comes to an end; below there, flat as a slightly inclined board, lies the Snake River Plain. Two towns, Wilford and Teton, sat at the terminus of the canyon, four or five miles apart. Teton was south of the river and above it; it would be spared, barely. Wilford was just north of the river at bank elevation. A few miles beyond Wilford was Sugar City, and six miles farther down was Rexburg, a community of eight thousand people. Another sixty river miles beyond was Idaho Falls, population 35,776, the third-largest town in Idaho. All four towns were going to absorb a direct hit, but none would be hit like Wilford. When road atlases were republished a year later, Wilford would not be listed among Idaho’s cities and towns.

The leading wave arrived twenty-five minutes after the dam broke. It was twenty feet high. The fastest egress to safety was the road north to St. Anthony, even though it went straight across the plain in sight of the river for three miles before it began to climb. As the last refugees from Wilford roared up the highway in their cars, they could see the flood approaching out of the east. It looked like a dust storm, until they saw the dust snapping huge cottonwoods in half. One of the first homes hit was Alice Birch’s. The day before, she had celebrated living in the same house for fifty years. The twenty-foot wall crashed into it, tore it off its foundations, and lifted it onto a power line, which snapped in half. The shooting voltage ignited a ruptured propane tank and Alice Birch’s house blew to smithereens.

Glen Bedford’s aging parents-in-law, the Liedings, lived in Wilford. When the first radio announcements about the dam came around ten o’clock, he raced up to their house from Parker, on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake, to help them get out. Roaring by his sister-in-law’s home in St. Anthony, five miles before Wilford, Glen Bedford saw his mother-in-law already unloading a pickup with a few belongings. Her husband was nowhere in sight. Believing that he was still at home in Wilford, Bedford drove his foot into the accelerator pedal. His fatlier-in-law, who had been behind the house and out of view, read Bedford’s mind and roared off after him. When he got to Wilford he could already see the flood pouring out of the canyon. From a mile and a half away, he said, it looked fifty feet high. When Lieding caught up with his son-in-law at his house he screamed at him to turn back to St. Anthony. “I’ll be there in four minutes!” Bedford yelled and ran upstairs to collect a last armload of valuables and mementos. They found him eleven days later, twisted almost beyond recognition amid a pile of trees and torn-up trailers.

Wilford went in an instant. The flood left only the two-story Mormon meetinghouse, and of that it left only the brick shell. The other 154 houses were intact or in pieces, riding the fifteen-mile-an-hour crest.

As the flood swept southwestward it spread to a width of two miles, but it had enough churning power to strip the topsoil off thousands of acres of first-class farmland. When it hit Sugar City the flood was no longer liquid, but semisolid.

There was a trailer park outside of Sugar City, and, according to witnesses in airplanes overhead, the flood hit town tumbling trailers like ice cubes, smashing houses off their foundations. Like Wilford, Sugar City was motionless one minute and moving fifteen miles an hour the next. Somehow, one of the victims there was killed by a shotgun blast.

In their desperation to flee Sugar City, Betty and Rodney Larson flooded their car’s engine so badly that it wouldn’t start. With the flood bearing down on them, it was too late to escape on foot. They ran upstairs with their three children and draped themselves over mattresses, hoping they would float. For three hours, their house felt as if a turbine generator were rattling itself loose in their basement. The house eventually came right off its foundation, but, miraculously, it did not move. Like a dud missile, it floated two feet off its pad and settled back down exactly where it had been. To pass the time, they counted dead cows.

Since eleven o’clock in the morning, the Rexburg police and civil defense had been herding people to higher ground. The Rexburg benchlands rise up from the eastern edge of the town, and on top of the first hill stood Mormon Ricks College, its dormitories recently emptied. Seven thousand people streamed up College Hill like the Hebrews during the Exodus, dragging whatever cars, wheelbarrows, and muscle could carry. By the time the flood hit Rexburg, the radio said, the crest would be only two to four feet deep. They saw the dust first, a four-mile-wide roiling cloud, then they saw the wall of water. It came just like a lava flow: five feet in front of it everything was dry, and then came the wave, seven feet high. Just before it hit town, the radio station went dead. The first thing the wave hit was the lumberyard outside of town. All the logs, thousands of them, were set loose. Dozens of them smashed against a bulk gasoline storage tank a few hundred yards away. The tank went off like a firebomb, setting flaming slicks adrift on the racing water. When the wave hit the front line of houses a hundred windows were instantaneously shattered. Witnesses said it sounded just like a rifle shot. Then the flaming gasoline poured into windows and set Rexburg on fire, like a floating-island dessert.

The throng on College Hill watched speechlessly as the wall of water washed their town away, burning it down as it went. A big white frame house floated over to the base of the hill below them and settled down in shallow water in the middle of a street. The water itself, moving only ten miles an hour now but engorged with a cubic quarter mile of topsoil, had force enough to separate homes from their foundations, but the real damage to Rexburg was done by Sugar City and Wilford. Reduced to giant pieces of flotsam—silos, walls, automobiles, telephone poles, pianos, trees—Wilford and Sugar City were a battering ram afloat, smashing Rexburg to pieces. When the flood passed after dusk, it had left six inches of silt on everything, as if it had snowed mud. A Greyhound bus sat on someone’s lawn.

A hundred miles downriver on the Snake was American Falls Reservoir, holding four times as much water as Teton had held. American Falls was one of the Bureau’s oldest dams. The dam was, in fact, unsafe—something the Bureau knew as early as 1966, but hadn’t bothered to correct. (In 1967, chief engineer Barney Bellport wrote Floyd Dominy that “the need for replacement of American Falls Dam is largely governed by structural reasons, although the deterioration of the concrete due to alkali-aggregate reaction contributes to the poor condition of the structure. The lack of bond between constriction joints and the fact that the dam was not designed for ice pressures are of great significance.” By 1976, however, the dam had been neither replaced nor fixed.)

If the dam was too weak to withstand the strain of the Teton flood coming on top of high flows in the Snake, the resulting calamity could only be guessed at. Instead of spreading out, the water would remain largely confined by the canyon of the Snake until it hit the Boise. Below, beyond Hells Canyon, the dams were lined up like dominoes: Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Granite, Lower Monumental; then the Columbia River and McNary, The Dalles, John Day, and Bonneville dams. The bigger Columbia dams would have seen such a flood before, perhaps, but those on the Snake, unless their reservoirs could be emptied in time, might meet flows they were never designed to handle. There was only one course of action: empty American Falls. Over two days, the archaic dam would have to release more water than it ever had before, and its reservoir would receive more at one time than it ever got.

By nightfall on Saturday, Rexburg was a silhouette of wreckage, carnage, and flaring fires. The lower half of the town was a total loss. As Rexburg finally became a vast, slowly shrinking pool of standing water, the flood was washing up against the Menan Buttes, some low hills off to the west. Now six miles wide, it split suddenly into two streams. The one veering northward around the buttes struggled upward against the inclined plain and fell back into a channel it quickly dug down to bedrock. Within minutes, it was a replica of the chocolate-brown Colorado River at high water. Then, beyond the buttes, the two channels rejoined, and the flood went into Idaho Falls.

Two things saved Idaho Falls. One was the geologic bedrock and soil which had made Teton such a bad project, physically and economically. By the time the flood poured itself into the Snake River twenty miles above the town, a lot of it had drained off into the porous soil and deeply fractured bedrock beneath it. The other salvation was a night and a day spent by thousands of volunteers sandbagging the levees along the river, which goes through the dead center of town. The flood built toward a crest all day Sunday and finally peaked, at just over 100,000 cubic feet per second, at ten o’clock at night. As logs, fiberboard, and bales of hay crashed up against the Broadway Bridge, which retained only inches of freeboard, a reservoir began to form behind it. Nine pounds of dynamite and a sixty-foot dragline could not dislodge the debris. It was only after an escape channel was dug that officials decided they wouldn’t have to blow up the bridge. It survived, looking as if it had been chewed by a hundred-foot shark. The town escaped with two hundred flooded homes.